Government (linguistics)

In grammar and theoretical linguistics, government or rection refers to the relationship between a word and its dependents. One can discern between at least three concepts of government: the traditional notion of case government, the highly specialized definition of government in some generative models of syntax, and a much broader notion in dependency grammars.

In traditional Latin and Greek (and other) grammars, government refers to the selection of grammatical features by verbs and prepositions. Most commonly, a verb or preposition is said to "govern" a specific grammatical case if its complement must take that case in a grammatically correct structure (see: case government). For example, in Latin, most transitive verbs require their direct object to appear in the accusative case, while the dative case is reserved for indirect objects. The verb favere (to help), however, is an exception to this default government pattern: its direct object must be in the dative. Thus, the phrase I see you would be rendered as Te video in Latin, using the accusative form te for the second person pronoun, while I help you would be rendered as Tibi faveo, using the dative form tibi. Prepositions (and postpositions and circumpositions, i.e. adpositions) are like verbs in their ability to govern the case of their complement, and like many verbs, many adpositions can govern more than one case, with distinct interpretations.

The abstract syntactic relation of government in government and binding theory, a phrase structure grammar, is an extension of the traditional notion of case government. Verbs govern their objects, and more generally, heads govern their dependents. A governs B if and only if:

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