Government Broadly Construed
One sometimes encounters definitions of government that are much broader than the one just produced. Government is understood as obtaining between a word and the constituents that that word requires or allows to appear. This broader understanding of government is what one finds in many dependency grammars. A given word governs all those words that it requires or allows to appear. The notion is that many individual words in a given sentence can appear only by virtue of the fact that some other word appears in that sentence. Government is defined as follows:
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- Government
- Government obtains when a dominant element (head) A opens a slot for a dependent element B.
According to this definition, government obtains between any two words connected by a dependency, the dominant word opening slots for subordinate words. The dominant word is the governor, and the subordinates are its governees. The following dependency tree illustrates governors and governees:
The word has governs Fred and ordered; in other words, has is governor over its governees Fred and ordered. Similarly, ordered governs dish and for, that is, ordered is governor over its governees dish and for; Etc. This understanding of government is widespread among dependency grammars.
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Famous quotes containing the words government, broadly and/or construed:
“In the long-run every Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)
“More broadly across time and cultures, it seems, one perennial piece of advice to father has been the importance of acting tenderly toward their children. The New Father, it turns out, is an old story.”
—David Blankenhorn (20th century)
“As a practicing member of several oppressed minority groups, I feel that I have on the whole conducted myself with the utmost decorum. I have ... refrained from marching, chanting ... or in any other way making anything that could even vaguely be construed as a fuss.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)