government in government and binding theory, a phrase structure grammar, is an extension of the traditional notion of case government. Verbs govern their objects, and more generally, heads govern their dependents. A governs B if and only if: A is a governor (a lexical head), A m-commands B, and no barrier intervenes between A and B. This definition is explained in more detail in the government section of the article on government and binding theory. Government broadly construed One sometimes encounters definitions of government that are much broader than the one just produced. Government is understood as the property that regulates which words can or must appear with the referenced word. This broader understanding of government is part of many dependency grammars. 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. According to this definition, government occurs 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. 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: 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. So while the