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.