Movement to Spec IP(66) an element governs everything within its own phrase, but not past a certain
point
The point of the ‘but’ clause in this definition is to impose locality on government. If a
head governs everything inside its phrase, then it can govern quite a long way if its
phrase happens to be a long one. Yet government is clearly a local relationship if it is
restricted to the situations in (65) and there seems to be a point beyond which
government cannot hold. How this point is identified and defined is a matter for
discussion, with a number of positions possible. But one thing we can conclude at this
point is that VP cannot be something that blocks government, otherwise the light verb
would not be able to Case-mark the object in the specifier of VP.
The other point of view observes that it does not seem to be mere coincidence that
the two instances of rightward Case assignment in (65) happen to involve accusative
Case while the leftward Case assignment involves nominative. The assumption is then
that there are two different processes at work here. For nominative the relevant
relationship is supposed to be specifier–head agreement, something we mentioned in
the previous chapter. The idea is that the finite inflectional element can assign
nominative Case to whatever it agrees with, and this will be its specifier. For
accusative Case however, government is the relevant relationship, though defined in a
slightly different way as it is no longer required to extend to the subject. Informally,
this version of government can be defined as:
(67) a head governs its sister and everything inside its sister, up to a point.
Again, the ‘point’ imposes locality restrictions on the government relationships. From
the present perspective there is very little between the two views that allow us to
favour one or the other and therefore we will leave the matter unresolved at this point.