Wh-movement

Wh-movement or wh-fronting is a syntactic phenomenon whereby interrogative words (sometimes called wh-words) appear at the beginning of an interrogative sentence. The term wh-movement is due to the fact that most English interrogative words start with wh-, for example, what, where, why, etc. The term wh-movement is applied universally, even when the interrogative words of a given language (such as French) do not start with wh-.

Related Topics:
Syntactic - Interrogative word - Interrogative sentence - French

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According to Joseph Greenberg's linguistic universal No.12, VSO languages always have wh-movement, while SOV languages never do. Many SVO languages have wh-movement too, such as English, but some don't, such as Mandarin. Languages without wh-movement are referred to as wh-in-situ languages.

Related Topics:
Joseph Greenberg - Linguistic universal - VSO - SOV - SVO - English - Mandarin

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