M-command

Quality 0.50 · 0 views · Updated 2 months ago

title: "M-command" type: doc version: 1 created: 2026-02-28 author: "Wikipedia contributors" status: active scope: public tags: ["generative-syntax", "syntactic-relationships", "syntax"] topic_path: "linguistics" source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-command" license: "CC BY-SA 4.0" wikipedia_page_id: 0 wikipedia_revision_id: 0

In generative grammar and related frameworks, m-command is a syntactic relation between two nodes in a syntactic tree. A node X m-commands a node Y if the maximal projection of X dominates Y, but neither X nor Y dominates the other.

In government and binding theory, m-command was used to define the central syntactic relation of government. However, it has been largely replaced by c-command in current research. M-command is a broader relation than c-command, since a node m-commands every node that it c-commands, as well as the specifier of the phrase that it heads. Like c-command, m-command is defined over constituency-based trees and plays no role in frameworks which adopt a different notion of syntactic structure.

References

::callout[type=info title="Wikipedia Source"] This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page. ::