Wh-movement : moving on - Volume 42

Linguists reconsider issues raised in Chomsky's 1977 article "On Wh-movement" from the perspective of current Minimalist theory.

Wh-movement - the phenomenon by which interrogative words appear at the beginning of interrogative sentences - is one of the central displacement operations of human language.

Noam Chomsky's 1977 article "On Wh-movement," a landmark in the study of wh-movement (and movement in general), showed that this computational operation is the basis of a variety of syntactic constructions that had previously been described in terms of construction-specific rules.

Taking Chomsky's article as a starting point, the contributors to this collection reconsider a number of the issues raised in "On Wh-movement" from the perspective of contemporary Minimalist syntactic theory (which explores the thesis that human language is a system optimally designed to meet certain interface conditions imposed by other cognitive systems with which the language faculty interacts).

They discuss such wh-movement issues as wh-phrases and pied-piping, the formation of A-bar chains and the copy theory of movement, cyclicity and locality of wh-movement, and the typology of wh-constructions.By reconsidering core characteristics of the wh-movement operation first systematically discussed by Chomsky from the Minimalist perspective, this volume contributes to the further development of the theory of wh-movement and to the general theory of movement.