What does wh-movement mean?

What does wh-movement mean?

In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words. Interrogative forms are known within English linguistics as wh-words such as what, when, where, who, and why, but also include interrogative words like how.

What is the difference between a movement and wh-movement?

Wh-movement, then, is a type of movement. In English, at least, it appears to be movement to the specifier of CP: In a question like the one in (8), the wh-word what appears at the beginning of the clause. Another difference between wh-movement and A-movement has to do with binding theory.

What is the head movement in wh-movement?

For head movement, it’s a head that moves, and it moves to another head position. For wh-movement, it’s a whole phrase that moves, and it ends up in the Specifier of CP. So when you’re depicting movement, always check that you’ve got the right kind of node moving to the right position.

What are Wh-questions?

Wh-questions are questions that begin with one of the eight “wh ” words: who, whose, what, when, which, why, where and how. Questions formed with “wh ” words ask about the word or phrase the “wh ” word replaces. Who replaces pronouns and the names of people.

What triggers wh-movement?

Wh-movement is triggered by the presence of an interrogative pronoun. We can assume that interrogative pronouns have a [+wh] feature that forces them to move.

Does Spanish have wh-movement?

AGR system among languages appear to give rise to different syntactic behaviors. Chinese, which lacks AGR, does not have wh-movement and needs a scope marker to transmit the [+wh] feature to the predicate. English and Spanish have AGR, which allows a wh-phrase to transmit its [+ wh] feature under Spec-head agreement.

Does Chinese have wh-movement?

This is because Chinese wh-arguments do not move but can be bound by the Q-operator in the matrix clause. In this respect, Japanese and Chinese wh-phrases differ. Putting these facts together, wh-adjuncts both in Chinese and Japanese undergo movement as illustrated in (4).

How do you change WH to indirect speech?

When we report a Wh-question, we use a reporting verb like asked or enquired….Change the following direct speech into indirect speech.

  1. ‘What do you want?
  2. He said, ‘How’s your mother.
  3. He enquired, ‘When do you intend to pay me?
  4. ‘Do you really come from China?

What comes after WH?

A wh-word or phrase appears at the beginning of the question to the left of the subject, followed by a “helping verb.” The helping verb will be some form of “auxiliary verb” (AUX) such as do (does, did, etc.), be (is, are, was, etc.), or have (has, had, etc.).

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