User:Biktor627/Case government

Old Version (March 2007)
In linguistics, case government is government of the grammatical case of verb arguments, 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.

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 in sentences such as He found me (not for example *He 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 kävely lle (literally 'to go to a walk'), where mennä means 'to go', kävely is 'a walk' and -lle is a postfix that denotes the allative case (usually means 'to' in English). This case must be always used in this context; one cannot say *mennä kävelyyn 'to go into a walk', for example.

= New version =

In linguistics, case government is government of the grammatical case of the noun argument of a verb or adposition. Verbs and adpositions are said to 'govern' the grammatical case of a noun phrase complement, meaning that they control which grammatical case the noun is inflected for.

German
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 dative when it denotes direction (to/from where?).

Russian
prepositional case