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)

The Completeness and Coherence Conditions

Words may specify in their lexical entries that they govern one or more GFs. These GFs are mentioned in the word's PRED value, e.g.

(1) disappear: [PRED   'DISAPPEAR<SUBJ>']
(2) see: [PRED   'SEE<SUBJ, OBJ>']

This means that the verb disappear governs one GF, namely a SUBJ and the verb see governs two GFs, a SUBJ and an OBJ. As a result, these verbs must appear with exactly these GFs, neither more, nor less. This is ensured by the following two principles:

The Completeness Condition (p. 21)
All governable functions which are part of th value of a PRED feature must be present in the local f-structure. All functions that have a θ-role must themselves have a PRED value.

This is the "no less" part from above: the f-structure of a PRED must contain at least the GFs which it selects in its PRED value.

The "no more" part is stated in the

Coherence Condition (p. 22)
All governable functions present in an f-structure must occur in the value of a local PRED feature. All functions that have a PRED value mst have a θ-role.

So, an f-structure is only complete and coherent only if there is a 1:1 relation between the GFs listed in its PRED value and the actual GFs present in the f-structure! If this is not the case, then the f-structure is ill-formed.

Governable features

Above, it was said that not only the GFs of its dependents, but other properties can be governed by a selecting head. These include inflectional features like PERS, NUM, and CASE. In other words, a head can require that its dependents have particular values for such features. In this section, we will see how this is done.

In Week 3, we already saw how features can be added to words themselves. There we formulated lexical entries like the following:

this D
    [PERS:3,
     NUM:sg];

We can of course do the same with verbs:

disappears D

          [PERS:3,
           NUM:sg];