Practical Grammar 6

Governable grammatical functions

In linguistics, a head governs a property of another expression if it requires this expression to have that property. Governable properties include grammatical functions, cases, and particular prepositions.

In Lexical-Functional Grammar, the governable grammatical functions are those which may be listed in the PRED values of meaningful words The textbook (p. 21) gives a complete list:

Governable grammatical functions: SUBJ, OBJ, OBJ-θ, OBL-θ, POSS, COMP, and XCOMP.

There are other GFs, for instance TOPIC and FOCUS, but heads cannot govern those.

The Greek letter θ in the functions OBJ-θ and OBL-θ stands for the name of a thematic role (the thematic roles are listed on p. 13 in the textbook). Thus, OBL-LOC is the GF of a locative PP (sit at the window), OBL-BEN the GF of a benefactive PP (bake a cake for Mary). The only thematic role that appears in OBJ-θ is THEME, the second object of verbs of giving and showing.

Here are some comments on the functions other than SUBJ and OBJ:

• OBJ-THEME: the GF of the second NP object of a ditransitive verb like give (e.g. give Mary a present)
• OBL-θ, for instance OBL-LOC: the GF of a PP which is a locative complement of a verb like sit (e.g. sit at the window)
• POSS: the GF of the possessor within an NP (e.g. my book)
• COMP: the GF of a finite complement clause complement of a verb like say (e.g. said that Mary called)
• XCOMP: the GF of non-finite phrases with understood subjects (e.g. Lilly tried to leave)

Governable features

Meaningful expressions may govern (= select) GFs in their PRED value.