Wh-movement - Basic Examples

Basic Examples

The following sentence pairs illustrate wh-movement. Each a-sentence has the canonical word order of a declarative sentence in English, and each b-sentence has experienced wh-movement, whereby the wh-word has been fronted in order to form a question. The relevant words are bolded:

a. Tom has been reading Tesnière.
b. Who has Tom been reading?
a. She should stop talking about syntax.
b. What should she stop talking about?
a. They want to visit us tomorrow.
b. When do they want to visit us?
a. She is happy.
b. What is she?

These examples illustrate that wh-fronting occurs when a constituent is questioned that appears to the right of the finite verb in the corresponding declarative sentence. Consider in this regard that when the subject is questioned, there is no obvious reason to assume that wh-fronting has occurred because the default position of the subject is clause-initial:

a. Fred is working hard.
b. Who is working hard?

Despite the fact that such data provide no obvious reason to assume movement, some theories of syntax maintain a movement analysis in the interest of remaining consistent. They assume that the wh-subject has in fact moved up the syntactic hierarchy, although this movement is not apparent from the actual linear order of the words.

Read more about this topic:  Wh-movement

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