Case government

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Government is a linguistic term for a kind of influence that one grammatical element exerts on another, and the canonical example of government is case government, when a verb or preposition is said to 'govern' the grammatical case on its noun phrase complement (e.g. zu governs the dative case in German: zu mir 'to me-dative'). The German term for the notion is Rektion.

Case government is a more important notion in languages with many case distinctions, such as Russian and Finnish. It plays less of a role in English, because English doesn't rely on grammatical cases, except for distinguishing subject pronouns (I, he, she, they) from other pronouns (me, him, her, them).

For example, in Finnish, a verb or sometimes even a particular meaning of a verb is associated with a case the referent noun must be in. "To go for a walk" is expressed as mennä kävelylle, where mennä means "to go", kävely is "a walk" and -lle is a postfix that denotes the allative case. This case must be always used in this context; one cannot say *mennä kävelyyn "to go inside a walk", for example.