Case government

In linguistics, case government is government of the grammatical case of verb arguments, when a verb or preposition is said to 'govern' the grammatical case on its noun phrase complement, e.g. zu governs the dative case in German: zu mir 'to me-dative'. The German term for the notion is Rektion. Case government may modify the meaning of the verb substantially, even to meanings that are unrelated. Analogously in programming, constructing two different functions of identical name but different parameters is called overloading a function.