Talk:Wh-movement

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[edit] "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."

This sounds fun and all, but the "up" in "put up" here is a verb particle, not a preposition, is it not? In that case, it would not be preposition stranding to do that. I think the sentence lacking preposition stranding should be, "This is the sort of bloody nonsense with which I will not put up." Cornince 22:47, 9 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Introduction doesn't explain what the article is.

What is the Wh-movement? Is it like a reform movement? Is it the positioning of the interrogative pronouns? And what the heck is with the t in the examples? --TheRaven7 14:40, 24 February 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the confusion is. The first sentence states the definition pretty explicitly:
Wh-movement (or wh-fronting or wh-extraction) is a syntactic phenomenon whereby interrogative words (sometimes called wh-words) appear at the beginning of an interrogative sentence.
In other words, languages that have wh-movement put their question words at the beginning of questions (i.e. "Who is that man?" instead of "That man is who?").
The t is already explained in the article as well:
In transformational approaches to syntax, wh-movement is analyzed literally in terms of constituent movement, where a moved constituent leaves behind a silent trace (often indicated by a t):
What does he buy t?
—Umofomia 12:43, 25 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "This is the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put."

I agree with Cornince. This has nothing to do with pied-piping and should be removed.

[edit] This article wins worst written article of the year

It's completely unintelligable. --67.149.66.30 00:36, 18 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Standard English

As a syntactician I must advise the author(s) against using the term "English" so broadly. Many structures that are ungrammatical in American English are perfectly grammatical in other dialects.

In Belfast English, for example, it IS considered grammatical invert subjects and verbs to form an embedded question:

(1) I wonder what did he buy.

(2) I wonder what should we eat for dinner.

I will be happy to provide sources; it will only be a matter of getting them scanned and posted to the internet. However, the grammaticality of the above structures is not the issue; referring to a general "English" is the problem.

Unless others object, I'd like to change references to English in this article to "Standard English" or "American English". Randomfocus (talk) 01:20, 26 January 2008 (UTC)

In "Standard English" you can say: "Tell me, what is the secret?" or "I wonder... what did he buy?". Are you sure the examples with inversion cannot be analyzed like that?  --Lambiam 06:58, 26 January 2008 (UTC)
I think this poster has a perfectly valid point -- I'm sorry that I did not remember that when writing this section, and I've modified the article to reflect possible dialect variation. At some point, I should also say something about lack of subject-auxiliary inversion in some dialects of African American Vernacular English. G.broadwell (talk) 01:53, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The irrelevance of Indo-European

I've deleted the part about Indo-European sound correspondences between English wh and Romance qu-, since I don't see how that is relevant to this article, which is about the syntax of moving an interrogative to the front of the sentence. Lambiam and I seem to disagree on this point :-) G.broadwell (talk) 01:55, 6 February 2008 (UTC)