Syntactic Theory


Government

governs if and only if

i) is a governor; and
ii) m-commands ; and
iii) no barrier intervenes between and .

Maximal projections are barriers to government. Governors are heads.

There is a refined notion of government which is particularly important for Case-theory. It is the same as the one above, except that the notion of governing head is specified individually:

Lexical heads (V0, N0, P0, A0) and tensed I0 are governors.