Editing Wh-movement (section)

{{Short description|Form of linguistic discontinuity}}
In [[linguistics]], '''wh-movement''' (also known as '''wh-fronting''', '''wh-extraction''', or '''wh-raising''') is the formation of [[syntactic]] dependencies involving [[interrogative]] words. An example in English is the dependency formed between ''what'' and the object position of ''doing'' in "What are you doing?". Interrogative forms are sometimes known within English linguistics as ''[[interrogative word|wh-words]]'', such as '''''wh'''at, '''wh'''en, '''wh'''ere, '''wh'''o'', and '''''wh'''y'', but also include other interrogative words, such as ''how''. This dependency has been used as a diagnostic tool in syntactic studies as it can be observed to interact with other grammatical constraints.

In languages with wh-[[syntactic movement|movement]], sentences or clauses with a wh-word show a non-canonical word order that places the wh-word (or phrase containing the wh-word) at or near the front of the sentence or clause ("''Whom'' are you thinking about?") instead of the canonical position later in the sentence ("I am thinking about ''you''"). Leaving the wh-word in its canonical position is called ''wh-in-situ'' and in English occurs in echo questions and [[Yes–no question|polar questions]] in informal speech.

Wh-movement is one of the most studied forms of [[discontinuity (linguistics)|linguistic discontinuity]].<ref>Accounts of ''wh''-fronting appear in many textbooks on syntax and grammar, e.g., Stockwell (1977:35ff.), Baker (1978:119ff.), Riemsdijk and Williams (1986:19ff.), Borsley (1988:188ff.), Radford (1997:267ff.), Roberts (1999:35ff.), Tallerman (2005:217ff.), Carnie (2013, ch.12.3, pp.357ff.).</ref> It is observed in many languages and plays a key role in the theories of long-distance dependencies.

The term ''wh-movement'' stemmed from early [[generative grammar]] in the 1960s and 1970s and was a reference to the theory of [[transformational grammar]], in which the interrogative expression always appears in its canonical position in the [[deep structure and surface structure|deep structure]] of a sentence but can move leftward from that position to the front of the sentence/clause in the surface structure.<ref name=":2">For early accounts of question formation and ''wh''-movement, see, for instance, Ross (1967/86:18ff.), Bach (1974:129), Culicover (1976:73f.), Stockwell (1977:172f.), Baker (1978:121f.).</ref> Although other theories of syntax do not use the mechanism of movement in the transformative sense, the term ''wh-movement'' (or equivalent terms, such as ''wh-fronting'', ''wh-extraction'', or ''wh-raising'') is widely used to denote the phenomenon, even in theories that do not model long-distance dependencies as a movement.