wh-

The usual abbreviation for a wh-word – a QUESTION WORD (INTERROGATIVE word) or RELATIVE item, such as what, who, which, when, why, how, etc. It is used generally in LINGUISTICS with reference to wh-complements, wh-movement, questions (wh-questions) and relative CLAUSES (wh-relatives). A wh-question is a term used in the grammatical subclassification of question types to refer to a question beginning with a question word. A multiple wh-question contains more than one wh-phrase. These ‘particular’ or ‘question word’ questions are contrasted with YES–NO QUESTIONS. The term is commonly used in the context of GENERATIVE GRAMMAR. A wh-NP is a noun phrase introduced by a wh-word (e.g. which car, what interest). Wh-movement (wh-fronting or wh-preposing) is used to refer to a TRANSFORMATIONAL RULE which moves a wh-phrase (wh-XP) to INITIAL POSITION in the SENTENCE. For example, given a DEEP STRUCTURE of the sentence Who did you see? as ‘You past see who’, applying wh-movement would result in ‘Who you past see’. Wh-islands are constructions beginning with a wh-phrase, out of which it is not possible to move a constituent through a transformational rule (the wh-island constraint). In later generative linguistics, several other types of construction are analyzed in a way similar to wh-questions, such as that-relatives and COMPARATIVES; they are known as UNBOUNDED DEPENDENCIES.

مواضيع ذات صلة

Language Mixture—Grammar

Change in grammar and pronunciation

Word order

Grammaticalization.

Convergence in the Balkans

Did we lose the perfect tense already?

It’s grammaticalization, innit?

Haugen’s model

Diglossia

Language shift and language death

Stratification and hypercorrection

Exploring variation in language