Editing Wh-movement (section)

==Basic examples==
The following examples of sentence pairs illustrate wh-movement in main clauses in English: each (a) example has the canonical word order of a declarative sentence in English, while each (b) sentence has undergone wh-movement, whereby the wh-word has been fronted in order to form a direct question.

<small>Wh-fronting of ''whom'', which corresponds to the direct object ''Tesnière''.</small>
: (1a) ''Tom has been reading '''Tesnière'''''.
: (1b) '''''Whom''' has Tom been reading?''

<small>Wh-fronting of ''what'', which corresponds to the prepositional object ''syntax''.</small>
: (2a) ''She should stop talking about '''syntax'''''.
: (2b) '''''What''' should she stop talking about?''

<small>Wh-fronting of ''when'', which corresponds to the temporal [[Adjunct (grammar)|adjunct]] ''tomorrow''.</small>
: (3a) ''They want to visit us '''tomorrow'''''.
: (3b) '''''When''' do they want to visit us?''

<small>Wh-fronting of ''what'', which corresponds to the [[predicative adjective]] ''happy''.</small>
: (4a) She is '''happy'''.
: (4b) '''What''' is she?

<small>Wh-fronting of ''where'', which corresponds to the [[prepositional phrase]] ''to school''.</small>
: (5a) She is going '''to school'''.
: (5b) '''Where''' is she going?

<small>Wh-fronting of ''how'', which corresponds to the [[adverb phrase]] ''well''.</small>
: (6a) They are doing '''well'''.
: (6b) '''How''' are they doing?

These examples illustrate that wh-movement occurs when a [[constituent (linguistics)|constituent]] is questioned that appears to the right of the [[finite verb]] in the corresponding declarative sentence. The main clause remains in [[V2 word order]], with the interrogative fronted to first position while the finite verb stays in second position. [[Do-support]] is often needed to enable wh-fronting in such cases, which are reliant on [[subject–auxiliary inversion]].

===Subject "fronting"===
When the subject is questioned, it is unclear whether wh-fronting has occurred because the default position of the subject is clause-initial. In the example sentence pair below, the subject ''Fred'' already appears at the front of the sentence where the interrogative is placed.

::a. '''Fred''' is working hard.
::b. '''Who''' is working hard?

Some theories of syntax maintain that this constitutes a wh-movement, and analyze such cases as if the interrogative subject has moved up the syntactic hierarchy; however, other theories observe that the surface string of words remains the same, and therefore, no movement has occurred.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Agbayani|first=Brian|date=2000-10-01|title=Wh-Subjects in English and the Vacuous Movement Hypothesis|url=https://doi.org/10.1162/002438900554523|journal=Linguistic Inquiry|volume=31|issue=4|pages=703–713|doi=10.1162/002438900554523|s2cid=57562940 |issn=0024-3892|url-access=subscription}}</ref>

===Distance of movement===
In many cases, wh-fronting can occur regardless of how far away its canonical location is, as seen in the following set of examples:

::a. '''Whom''' does Mary like __?
::b. '''Whom''' does Bob know that Mary likes __?
::c. '''Whom''' does Carl believe that Bob knows that Mary likes __?

The interrogative ''whom'' is the direct object of the verb ''like'' in each of these examples. The dependency relation between the canonical, empty position and the wh-expression appears to be unbounded, in the sense that there is no upper bound on how deeply embedded within the given sentence the empty position may appear.