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In linguistics, a feature of a word or phrase is said to be covert if there is no surface evidence of its existence within that word or phrase. For example, many languages have covert grammatical gender in nouns, in that there is no way to tell from the form of a noun which gender it is; gender only becomes apparent in, for example, articles and adjectival agreement, which depend on gender.
In English, verbification typically involves simple conversion of a non-verb to a verb. The verbs to verbify and to verb, the first by derivation with an affix and the second by zero derivation, are themselves products of verbification (see autological word), and, as might be guessed, the term to verb is often used more specifically, to refer only to verbification that does not involve a ...
This is an example of a subject control construction, where the pronominal subject [He] is selected for by both the main verb [like] and the embedded infinitive verb [stay], thus forcing the introduction of an unpronounced lexical item (PRO) at the subject of the embedded clause, in order to fulfil the selectional requirements of both verbs. [9]
A sentence word involves invisible covert syntax and visible overt syntax. The invisible section or "covert" is the syntax that is removed in order to form a one word sentence. The visible section or "overt" is the syntax that still remains in a sentence word. [15]
A coverb is a word or prefix that resembles a verb or co-operates with a verb. In languages that have the serial verb construction, coverbs are a type of word that shares features of verbs and prepositions. A coverb takes an object or complement and forms a phrase that appears in sequence with another verb phrase in accordance with the serial ...
A consequence of the EPP is that clauses that lack an overt subject must necessarily have an "invisible" or "covert" subject; with non-finite clauses this covert subject is PRO. [ 5 ] Motivation for a PRO subject comes from the grammaticality of sentences such as (1) and (2), where the subject of the infinitival to -clause, though not overtly ...
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong ...
Inflection of the Scottish Gaelic lexeme for 'dog', which is cù for singular, chù for dual with the number dà ('two'), and coin for plural. In linguistic morphology, inflection (less commonly, inflexion) is a process of word formation [1] in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...