Government (linguistics)

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In linguistics, government is the selection of grammatical features by verbs and prepositions in inflected languages. Most commonly, a verb is said to govern a specific grammatical case if its complement must take that case in a grammatically correct sentence.

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 defalt government pattern: its direct object must be in the dative. Thus, the phrase "I see you" would be rendered "Te video" in Latin, using the accusative form te for the second person pronoun, while "I help you" would be rendered "Tibi faveo", using the dative form tibi.

Prepositions can govern a many different cases. A particular preposition can govern more than one case, with distinct interpretations.

The definition of government can be extended to syntactic categories other than verbs and prepositions, and to grammatical features other than case. For example, the adjective fond combines with a complement phrase introduced by the preposition of (as in fond of rice pudding). The selection of this particular preposition by the adjective is an instance of government.

The abstract syntactic relation of government in Government and binding theory can also be seen as an extension of the traditional notion of case government.