Case government

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Case government is a linguistical term for the effect of a verb on the surrounding grammatical cases and their effects on the meaning. It is a form of agreement, but it is not only for reduncancy, rather it can create semantical contrasts. It is typically highly arbitrary and specific to a given verb.

Case government is found German (Rektion) and Finnish, for example. In Finnish, a telicity contrast is expressed. In German, the object of a verb is in the accusative case, but there are several verbs that arbitrarily require a different case or a preposition for the object.

Case government is absent in English, because English doesn't rely on grammatical cases, but several postpositions create similar contrasts: e.g. blow vs. blow up.]

In other languages