Government (linguistics) - Governors Vs. Heads

Governors Vs. Heads

The distinction between the terms governor and head is a source of confusion, given the definitions of government produced above. Indeed, governor and head are overlapping concepts. The governor and the head of a given word will often be one and the same other word. The understanding of these concepts becomes difficult, however, when discontinuities are involved. The following example of a w-fronting discontinuity from German illustrates the difficulty:

Wem	denkst	du	haben	sie	geholfen?
who-DAT	think	you	have	they	helped	'Who do you think they helped?'

Two of the criteria mentioned above for identifying governors (and governees) are applicable to the interrogative pronoun wem 'whom'. This pronoun receives dative case from the verb geholfen 'helped' (= case government) and it can appear by virtue of the fact that geholfen appears (= licensing). Given these observations, one can make a strong argument that geholfen is the governor of wem, even though the two words are separated from each other by the rest of the sentence. In such constellations, one sometimes distinguishes between head and governor. The governor of wem is indeed geholfen, but one takes the finite verb denkst 'think' to be its head. In other words, when a discontinuity obtains, one assumes that the governor and the head (of the relevant word) are distinct, otherwise they are the same word. Exactly how the terms head and governor are used can depend on the particular theory of syntax that is employed.