Wh-movement

In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, wh-raising) concerns rules of syntax involving the placement of interrogative words. In plain terms, it refers to an asymmetry between the syntactical arrangement of words or morphemes in a question and the form of answers to that question; specifically, the placement of the question word. An example in English is 'What are you doing?', a response to which could be 'I am editing Wikipedia.'; in which the answer (editing Wikipedia) is at the end of the sentence but the question word (What) is at the beginning. In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, wh-raising) concerns rules of syntax involving the placement of interrogative words. In plain terms, it refers to an asymmetry between the syntactical arrangement of words or morphemes in a question and the form of answers to that question; specifically, the placement of the question word. An example in English is 'What are you doing?', a response to which could be 'I am editing Wikipedia.'; in which the answer (editing Wikipedia) is at the end of the sentence but the question word (What) is at the beginning. Interrogative forms, whatever the language, are known within linguistics as wh-words because most question words in the English language start with a wh-; such as what, when, where, who, and why. In English, only one interrogative word does not begin with wh-, namely how. In languages with wh-movement, sentences or clauses with a wh-word show a special word order that places the wh-word (or phrase containing the wh-word) at 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. Wh-movement often results in a discontinuity, and in that regard, it is one of (at least) four widely acknowledged discontinuity types, the others being topicalization, scrambling, and extraposition. Wh-movement is found in many languages around the world, and of the various discontinuity types, wh-movement is the one that has been studied the most. It is observed in many of the world's languages, and plays a key role theories of long-distance dependencies. Historically, the name wh-movement stems from early generative grammar (1960s and 1970s) and was a reference to the transformational analysis of the day in which the wh-expression appears in its canonical position at deep structure and then moves leftward from that position to a derived position at the front of the sentence/clause at surface structure. Although many 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, wh-raising) is widely used to denote the phenomenon, even in theories that do not model long-distance dependencies as movement. What needs to be considered is that wh-movement does not occur solely due to interrogative words. Wh-words are used to form questions, and can also occur in relative clauses. Wh-movement occurs from the existing EPP (Extended projection principle). There are three types of wh-expressions overall- Interrogative, Relative, and Pseudo-cleft wh-expressions.