Case Government

In linguistics, case government is a type of government wherein a verb or adposition imposes grammatical case requirements on its noun phrase complement. For example, in German the preposition 'for' governs the accusative case: 'for me-accusative'. Case government may modify the meaning of the verb substantially, even to meanings that are unrelated.

Case government is an important notion in languages with many case distinctions, such as Russian and Finnish. It plays less of a role in English, because English does not 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 in sentences such as ''He found me'' (not for example *''He found I'').

Adpositions

In Standard German, there are prepositions which govern each of the three oblique cases: Accusative, Dative, and Genitive. Case marking in German is largely observed on elements which modify the noun (e.g. determiners, adjectives). In the following table, examples of ''Löffel'' 'spoon' (Masculine), ''Messer'' 'knife' (Neuter), and ''Gabel'' 'fork' (Feminine) are in definite noun phrases for each of the four cases. In the oblique cases (i.e. non-Nominative), the prepositions supplied dictate different cases: ''ohne'' 'without' governs the accusative, ''mit'' 'with' governs the dative, and ''wegen'' 'because of' governs the genitive:

There are also two-way prepositions which govern the dative when the prepositional phrase denotes location (''where at?''), but the accusative when it denotes direction (''to/from where?'').

Verbs

In Finnish, certain verbs or groups of verbs require associated objects to employ particular cases or case-like suffixes regardless of the circumstances in which a case is normally used. For example, certain verbs expressing emotions such as (to love), (to hate), and (to fear) require the use of the partitive case: thus, "Minä rakastan sinua" (I love you), in which "sinua" is partitive although a complete concrete entity as object would normally take the genitive. A number of verbs associated with sensory perception such as (to taste) and (to sound) employ the ablative-like suffix -lta/-ltä: "Jäätelö maistuu hyvältä" (Ice cream tastes good). And certain verbs referring to interests or hobbies such as (to like) and (to enjoy) use the elative-like suffix -sta/-stä.

In books on Finnish grammar written in Finnish the phenomenon of case government is usually referred to as "", from the Latin
(control or governance).

See also

* Government
* Grammatical case
* Theta role

References

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Case Government
Grammar