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?

Etymology

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

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˌdʌbəlju ˈeɪtʃ ˌmuvmənt/

Noun

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

1. (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.

Synonyms

• wh-extraction
• wh-fronting

Hypernyms

• A-bar movement

Related terms

• wh-in-situ
• wh-island
• wh-word

Translations

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)

See also

• parasitic gap

Further reading

• wh-movement on Wikipedia.Wikipedia