Government and Binding Theory

The Government and Binding (GB) theory is a framework in linguistics that explains how humans understand and produce sentences. It suggests that our brains have an innate set of rules and structures—called principles and parameters—that guide sentence formation. These rules help determine how words are connected and how meaning is conveyed, allowing us to generate and interpret an almost infinite variety of sentences. Essentially, GB theory explores the underlying mental mechanisms that enable us to understand language, focusing on how different parts of a sentence are linked through a system of governance and syntactic constraints.