governmental for state

[ostap77]

Can I use the adjective "governmental" for the noun "state" as in "the governmental leadership" for "the state leadership"?

[BobK]

I don't understand the question. Please punctuate it intelligibly.

Generally speaking though, it's risky to replace an adjective with a noun...

[ostap77]

I don't understand the question. Please punctuate it intelligibly.

Generally speaking though, it's risky to replace an adjective with a noun...

Would there be the difference in meaning if I said "the governmental leadership" for "the state leadership"? There are state universities and state colleges.

[BobK]

'Governmental' doesn't sound right to me. I've had a look in BNC (British National Corpus (BYU-BNC)), and it has no hits for 'governmental leadership', 7 for 'state leadership' and 6 for 'government leadership'. COCA - a bigger corpus, for Am Eng) has 6 hits for 'governmental leadership' but 5 or 6 times as many for each of the others.

b