Government

Once a specific predicate word is inserted into a deep-structure, its presence may call for certain modifications in the rest of the sentence. The typical case of this is what is known as ‘government’. For English the operation of the rules establishing ‘government’ associates prepositions with noun-phrases and ‘complementizers’ with embedded sentences and their parts.¹ Thus - to consider only the association of prepositions with noun-phrases - we speak of ‘giving something to somebody’, ‘accusing somebody of something’, ‘blaming something on somebody’, ‘interesting somebody in something’, ‘acquainting somebody with something’, and so on. It is certain, of course, that many of the facts about particular choices of prepositions and complementizers are redundantly specified by other independently motivated features of predicates or are determined from the nature of the underlying case relationship, so that a minimally redundant dictionary will not need to indicate anything about the form of governed constituents directly. Until it is clear just what the needed generalizations are, however, I propose using the brute-force method and specifying the prepositions one at a time for each verb and each case relationship.

¹ The term ‘complementizer’ is taken from Peter Rosenbaum, The Grammar of English Predicate Complement Constructions (1968), M.I.T. Press, and refers to the provision of that, ing, etc., in clauses embedded to predicates.