wh-movement

English

Examples

He buys bread.

When the word bread is replaced with a wh-word in order to form a question, wh-movement occurs:

What does he buy?

Most English interrogative words start with wh-, for example, who, whom, whose, what, which, when, where, why, etc. (though how is an exception).

wh-movement (countable and uncountable, plural wh-movements)

(syntax) a syntactic phenomenon found in many languages around the world, in which interrogative words (sometimes called wh-words) or phrases show a special word order. Unlike ordinary phrases, such wh-words appear at the beginning of an interrogative clause.

special order in interrogative sentences

Chinese:
Cantonese: 疑問詞移位／疑问词移位 (ji⁴ man⁶ ci⁴ ji⁴ wai⁶)

Mandarin: 疑問詞移位／疑问词移位 (yíwèncí yíwèi)
French: mouvement qu- m
Russian: перемеще́ние вопроси́тельных сло́в n (peremeščénije voprosítelʹnyx slóv)