| It is called government when one word carries a marker indicating a syntactic relationship to another word not so marked (Thomas, 1988). Government means certain inflectional forms are used primarily to signal the place of the word in a construction . When nouns are involved, these special categories are known as cases. In such a language, each noun occurs in a small paradigm of forms. Each form is restricted to a certain list of syntactic positions, and hence contributes to marking the structure. Each form in this paradigm is said to represent some case (Gleason, 1961:159). (semantically) In Finnish 'house' has the forms: talo nominative subject talon genitive of talon accusative object talosta elative out of talossa inessive in taloon illative into tallola adessive on, at talolta ablative from talolle allative to talona essive as taloa partitive (part) of taloksi translative (changes) into talotaa abvessive without taloin instructive with, by taloine comitative together with In Sanskrit there are eight cases: (structurally) nominative subject of a sentence deevii 'goddess' accusative direct object deeviim instrumental attributive to predicate deevyaa or sentence dative indirect object deevyaai ablative attributive to predicate deevyaas or sentence genitive attributive to a noun deevyaas locative attributive to predicate deevyaam or sentence vocative loosely connected to deevii sentence Examples of government in German: Ich rufe den Mann. 'I call the man.' (accusative case) Ich helfe dem Mann. 'I help the man.' (dative case) Ich gedenke des mannes. 'I remember the man.' (genitive case) Notice that the form of the definite article: den, dem, des, is governed by the verb. Examples of government in Latin urbs 'the city', nominative ad urbem 'to the city', accusative prope urbem 'near the city', accusative ex urbe 'from the city', ablative pro urbe 'for the city', ablative in urbem 'into the city', accusative in urbe 'in the city', ablative Notice that the form of noun is governed by the preposition (Thomas, 1988:52) Government is not restricted to nouns. In Zulu for instance, the adjective has different form when attributive to noun than forming a predicate (Gleason, 1961:162). Umuntu omkhulu uzwa/ 'The big man hears.' Umuntu mkhulu. 'The man is big.' Inkosi endala izwa. 'The old chief hears.' Inkosi indala. 'The chief is old.' Many languages exhibit agreement with respect to person and number, between nouns or pronouns and other forms which signal person elsewhere in the clause (most frequently, person affixes in the verb word). Such agreement is referred to as crossreference, because both markers have to refer to the same person (Thomas, 1988:79). In Latin predicative constitute such as puer puellam amat 'the boy loves the girl', there is cross?reference between the subject puer 'boy' and the inflectional affix ?t in the verb, which specifies that the subject is third person singular. A change in the subject may entail a change in the inflectional affix in the verb:pueri puellam amant 'the boys love the girl' (Hockett, 1958:218). According to Thomas (1988:79) cross?reference means agreement with respect to person or number between nouns or pronouns and other forms which signal person elsewhere in the clause. Another instance of agreement is found in English in that the present tense the verb occurs with an ?s suffix when there is a third person subject: I walk but he walks (Elson & Pikcett, 1976). In Latin the form of verb is influenced by person of the subject. The word amare 'love' changes as follows (Chaer1994): 1 singular amo 1 plural amanus 2 singular amas 2 plural amatis 3 singular amat 3 plural amant In Latin (Verhaar, 1999): Singular Masculine Feminine Neutral nominative bonus bona bonum genitive boni bonae boni dative bono bonae bono accusative bonum bonam bonum vocative bone bona bonum ablative bono bona bono |