The name refers to two central subtheories of the theory: government, which is an abstract syntactic relation applicable, among other things, to the assignment of case; and binding, which deals chiefly with the relationships between pronouns and the expressions with which they are co-referential.
GB was the first theory to be based on the principles and parameters model of language, which also underlies the later developments of the minimalist program.
The main application of the government relation concerns the assignment of case.
Binding can be defined as follows: Consider the sentence "Johni saw hisi mother", which is diagrammed below using simple phrase structure trees.
On the other hand, in the ungrammatical sentence "*The mother of Johni likes himselfi", "John" does not c-command "himself", so they have no binding relationship despite the fact that they corefer.