Case government
Encyclopedia
In linguistics
, case government is government of the grammatical case
of verb argument
s, 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 may modify the meaning of the verb substantially, even to meanings that are unrelated. Analogously in programming, constructing two different function
s of identical name but different parameters is called overloading a function.
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, we, they) from other pronouns (me, him, her, us, them). In English, true case government is absent, but if the aforementioned subject pronouns are understood as regular pronouns in the accusative case
, it occurs sentences such as He found me (not for example *Him found I).
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.
Many verbs can have unrelated meanings that differ only by the case used on the noun. This is similar to the programming concept of overloading. For example, the verb naida in conjunction with an object in accusative (naida joku) means "to marry someone", but with an object in partitive
(naida jotakuta) it is obscene in the meaning "to fuck someone".
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, case government is government of the grammatical case
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
of verb argument
Verb argument
In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
s, when a verb or preposition is said to 'govern' the grammatical case
Grammatical case
In grammar, the case of a noun or pronoun is an inflectional form that indicates its grammatical function in a phrase, clause, or sentence. For example, a pronoun may play the role of subject , of direct object , or of possessor...
on its noun phrase complement, e.g. zu governs the dative case
Dative case
The dative case is a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given, as in "George gave Jamie a drink"....
in German: zu mir 'to me-dative'. The German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
term for the notion is Rektion. Case government may modify the meaning of the verb substantially, even to meanings that are unrelated. Analogously in programming, constructing two different function
Subroutine
In computer science, a subroutine is a portion of code within a larger program that performs a specific task and is relatively independent of the remaining code....
s of identical name but different parameters is called overloading a function.
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, we, they) from other pronouns (me, him, her, us, them). In English, true case government is absent, but if the aforementioned subject pronouns are understood as regular pronouns in the accusative case
Accusative case
The accusative case of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb. The same case is used in many languages for the objects of prepositions...
, it occurs sentences such as He found me (not for example *Him found I).
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
Allative case
Allative case is a type of the locative cases used in several languages. The term allative is generally used for the lative case in the majority of languages which do not make finer distinctions.-Finnish language:In the Finnish language, the allative is the fifth of the locative cases, with the...
. This case must be always used in this context; one cannot say *mennä kävelyyn "to go inside a walk", for example.
Many verbs can have unrelated meanings that differ only by the case used on the noun. This is similar to the programming concept of overloading. For example, the verb naida in conjunction with an object in accusative (naida joku) means "to marry someone", but with an object in partitive
Partitive
In linguistics, the partitive is a word, phrase, or case that divides something into parts. For example, in the English sentence I'll have some coffee, some is a partitive determiner because it makes the noun phrase some coffee refer to a subset of all coffee...
(naida jotakuta) it is obscene in the meaning "to fuck someone".