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Wh-movement (or wh-fronting or wh-extraction or long-distance dependency) is a mechanism of syntax that helps express a question (or form a relative clause). Sentences or clauses containing a ''wh-word'' (interrogative word) show a special word order that has the ''wh''-word (or phrase containing the ''wh''-word) appearing at the front of the sentence or clause, e.g. ''Who do you think about?'', instead of in a more canonical position further to the right, e.g. ''I think about you''. The term ''wh-movement'' is used because most English interrogative words start with ''wh-'', for example, ''who(m)'', ''whose'', ''what'', ''which'', etc. Wh-movement often results in a discontinuity, and in this regard, it is one of (at least) four widely acknowledged discontinuity types, the other three being topicalization, scrambling, and extraposition. Wh-movement is found in many languages around the world, and of these various discontinuity types, wh-movement has been studied the most.〔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 (2013:357ff.).〕 The name ''wh-movement'' stems from early Generative Grammar (1960s and 1970s) and was a reference to the transformational analysis of that day, whereby the wh-expression appeared in its canonical position at deep structure and then moved leftward out of that position to land in its derived position at the front of the sentence/clause at surface structure.〔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.).〕 Many modern theories of syntax do not acknowledge movement in this sense, nonetheless the term ''wh-movement'' (or ''wh-fronting'' or ''wh-extraction'') survives and is widely used to denote the observed phenomenon even by those theories that do not acknowledge movement. ==Basic examples== The following sentence pairs illustrate wh-movement. Each a-sentence has the canonical word order of a declarative sentence in English, and each b-sentence has experienced wh-movement, whereby the wh-word has been fronted in order to form a question. The relevant words are bolded: ::a. Tom has been reading Tesnière. ::b. Who has Tom been reading? - The direct object corresponding to ''Tesnière'' has been wh-fronted as the wh-word ''who''. ::a. She should stop talking about syntax. ::b. What should she stop talking about? - The object of the preposition corresponding to ''syntax'' has been wh-fronted as the wh-word ''what''. ::a. They want to visit us tomorrow. ::b. When do they want to visit us? - The adjunct corresponding to ''tomorrow'' has been wh-fronted as the wh-word ''when''. ::a. She is happy. ::b. What is she? - The predicative adjective corresponding to ''happy'' has been fronted as the wh-word ''what''. These examples illustrate that wh-fronting occurs when a constituent is questioned that appears to the right of the finite verb in the corresponding declarative sentence. Consider in this regard that when the subject is questioned, there is no obvious reason to assume that wh-fronting has occurred because the default position of the subject is clause-initial: ::a. Fred is working hard. ::b. Who is working hard? - The subject corresponding to ''Fred'' already appears at the front of the sentence, so there is no reason to assume that ''who'' has been fronted. Despite the fact that such data provide no obvious reason to assume movement, some theories of syntax maintain a movement analysis in the interest of remaining consistent. They assume that the wh-subject has in fact moved up the syntactic hierarchy, although this movement is not apparent from the actual linear order of the words. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Wh-movement」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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