What is WH movement in linguistics?

In linguistics, wh-movement (also known as wh-fronting, wh-extraction, or wh-raising) is the formation of syntactic dependencies involving interrogative words.

Does China have WH movement?

In short, in Chinese WH-syntax, a time adverb is located between the subject and the main verb in a sentence, regardless of whether it is a WH-question or an affirmative sentence. For this reason, it can be concluded that Chinese is categorized as a Wh-in situ language.

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.

Why do we assume wh-movement?

As usual when we are confronted with a mismatch of this sort, we invoke movement in order to allow a single phrase to simultaneously play several roles in a sentence. Specifically, we will have the wh- phrase originate as the sister of the verb whose object it is and then move to Spec(CP).

What triggers WH movement?

Does Spanish have WH movement?

English and Spanish have AGR, which allows a wh-phrase to transmit its [+ wh] feature under Spec-head agreement.

What is Subjacency in linguistics?

Subjacency is a general syntactic locality constraint on movement. It specifies restrictions placed on movement and regards it as a strictly local process. This term was first defined by Noam Chomsky in 1973 and constitutes the main concept of the Government and Binding Theory.

What are the 8 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.

What is ECP in syntax?

In linguistics, the empty category principle (ECP) was proposed in Noam Chomsky’s syntactic framework of government and binding theory. The ECP is supposed to be a universal syntactic constraint that requires certain types of empty categories, namely traces, to be properly governed.

What is Subjacency principle?

This principle states that no movement can move an element over more than one bounding node at a time.