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Case government

Grammatical term

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 für 'for' governs the accusative case: für mich '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 that govern each of the three oblique cases: accusative, dative, and genitive. Case-marking in German is largely observed on elements that modify the noun (e.g. determiners, adjectives). In the following table, the 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:

Gender	Masculine	Neuter	Feminine	Nominative	Accusative	Dative	Genitive
der Löffel	the.M.NOM.SG spoon.NOM.SG	'the spoon'		das Messer	the.N.NOM.SG knife.NOM.SG	'the knife'
ohne den Löffel	without the.M.ACC.SG spoon.ACC.SG	'without the spoon'		ohne das Messer	without the.N.ACC.SG knife.ACC.SG	'without the knife'
	mit dem Löffel	with the.M.DAT.SG spoon.DAT.SG	'with the spoon'		mit dem Messer	with the.N.DAT.SG knife.DAT.SG	'with the knife'
wegen des Löffels	{because of} the.M.GEN.SG spoon-M.GEN.SG	'because of the spoon'		wegen des Messer-s	{because of} the.N.GEN.SG knife-N.GEN.SG	'because of the knife'

There are also two-way prepositions that 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 rakastaa (to love), inhota (to hate), and pelätä (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 maistua (to taste) and kuulostaa (to sound) use the ablative-like suffix -lta/-ltä: "Jäätelö maistuu hyvältä" (Ice cream tastes good). Also, certain verbs referring to interests or hobbies such as pitää (to like) and nauttia (to enjoy) use the elative-like suffix -sta/-stä.

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

References

(2012). "Suomen Mestari 2". Finn Lectura.

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