Governance (linguistics)

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In linguistics, governance is a feature of the verbs and prepositions of inflected languages. A verb is said to govern a grammatical case when its complement must take that case in a grammatically correct sentence.

Governance is usually specified only when it diverges from the norm in a given language. In Latin, for example, most transitive verbs take a direct object in the accusative case, while the dative is reserved for the indirect object; the verb favere (to help) is said to govern the dative because its direct object must be placed 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.

 

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