In grammar and theoretical linguistics, government or rection refers to the relationship between a word and its dependents.
In traditional Latin and Greek (and other) grammars, government is the control by verbs and prepositions of the selection of grammatical features of other words.
The verb favere (to help), like many others, is an exception to this default government pattern: its one and only object must be in the dative.
A semantic alternation may also be achieved when different case constructions are available with a verb: Id credo (id is an accusative) means I believe this, I have this opinion and Ei credo (ei is a dative) means I trust this, I confide in this.
[5] The distinction between the terms governor and head is a source of confusion, given the definitions of government produced above.
'Two of the criteria mentioned above for identifying governors (and governees) are applicable to the interrogative pronoun wem 'whom'.
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.