generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

and related frameworks, m-command is a syntactic relation between two nodes in a syntactic tree. A node

X

m-commands a node

Y

if the maximal projection of

X

dominates

Y

, but neither

X

nor

Y

dominates the other. In government and binding theory, m-command was used to define the central syntactic relation of ''

government A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a State (polity), state. In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive (government), execu ...

''. However, it has been largely replaced by

c-command In generative grammar and related frameworks, a node in a parse tree c-commands its sister node and all of its sister's descendants. In these frameworks, c-command plays a central role in defining and constraining operations such as syntactic movem ...

in current research. M-command is a broader relation than

, since a node m-commands every node that it c-commands, as well as the specifier of the

phrase In grammar, a phrasecalled expression in some contextsis a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English language, English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adject ...

that it heads. Like c-command, m-command is defined over constituency-based trees and plays no role in frameworks which adopt a different notion of syntactic structure.

References

* * {{Formal semantics Generative syntax Syntactic relationships Syntax