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Concept
Government (linguistics)
Summary
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.
Case government
In traditional Latin and Greek (and other) grammars, government is the control by verbs and prepositions of the selection of grammatical features of other words. 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. Thus, the phrase I see you would be rendered as Te video in Latin, using the accusative form te for the second person pronoun, and I give a present to you would be rendered as Tibi donum do, using both an accusative (donum) for the direct and a dative (tibi; the dative of the second person pronoun) for the indirect object; the phrase I help you, however, would be rendered as Tibi faveo, using only the dative form tibi. The verb favere (to help), like many others, is an exception to this default government pattern: its one and only object must be in the dative. Although no direct object in the accusative is controlled by the specific verb, this object is traditionally considered to be an indirect one, mainly because passivization is unavailable except perhaps in an impersonal manner and for certain verbs of this type. A semantic alternation may also be achieved when different case constructions are available with a verb: Id credo (id is an accusative) means I believe this, I have this opinion and Ei credo (ei is a dative) means I trust this, I confide in this.
Prepositions (and postpositions and circumpositions, i.e.
Official source
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