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Wh-movement

In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting or wh-extraction or long-distance dependency) concerns special rules of syntax—rules observed in many languages around the world—involving the placement of interrogative words. The special interrogatives, whatever the language, are known within linguistics as wh-words (so named because most interrogative words in the English language start with a wh-; for example, who(m), whose, what, which, etc.). Wh-words are used to form questions, and can also occur in relative clauses. In languages exhibiting wh-movement, sentences or clauses containing a wh-word show a special word order that has the wh-word (or phrase containing the wh-word) appearing at the front of the sentence or clause, e.g. Who do you think about?, instead of in a more canonical position further to the right, e.g. I think about you.

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? – The direct object corresponding to Tesnière has been wh-fronted as the wh-word who.

a. She should stop talking about syntax.

b. What should she stop talking about? – The object of the preposition corresponding to syntax has been wh-fronted as the wh-word what.

a. They want to visit us tomorrow.

b. When do they want to visit us? – The adjunct corresponding to tomorrow has been wh-fronted as the wh-word when.

a. She is happy.

b. What is she? – The predicative adjective corresponding to happy has been fronted as the wh-word what.