8.10 Wh-Movement
Check Yourself
1. Which tree diagram correctly represents the Deep Structure for the question, “Who did Brenda see at the gym?”
2. Which tree diagram correctly represents the Surface Structure for the question, “Where did you get that hat?”
3. Which tree diagram correctly represents the Surface Structure for the question, “Why should I trust you?”
Video Script
In the last unit, we extended our model of the syntax component of the mental grammar. The idea is that we draw words, morphemes and features from our mental lexicon, and the operation MERGE combines them using X-bar principles. The structure that MERGE generates is called a Deep Structure; it’s the underlying form of a sentence that we hold in our minds, but it’s not always exactly like the form that we speak out loud. For some sentences, a second operation, MOVE, takes some elements from the Deep Structure and moves them to another position in the Surface Structure.
The MOVE operation that we’ve seen so far takes a head and moves it to another head position, leaving a trace behind. For obvious reasons, this kind of movement operation is called head movement, and the primary job that head movement does is to form yes-no questions. For this question, Has Faiza eaten lunch yet?, there’s only a small set of possible answers that are grammatical: yes, no, I don’t know, maybe.
But of course, yes-no questions aren’t the only kinds of questions we ask in English. Take a look at these questions:
What is Ramesh cooking?
Who is he cooking for?
When is Leela arriving?
Where did he buy the ingredients?
Why is he making samosas?
How do they taste?
These questions don’t take Yes or No as their answers, they take phrases.
What is Ramesh cooking? Samosas.
Who is he cooking for? Leela.
When is Leela arriving? In an hour.
Where did he buy the ingredients? At the store.
Why is he making samosas? Because Leela loves them.
How do they taste? Delicious!
We call these wh-questions because most of the English words that we use in these questions are spelled with “wh”. Notice that how counts as a wh-word even though it doesn’t have the letter “w” in it.
What we’re observing here is the Surface Structures of these wh-questions. What might their Deep Structures be? To figure that out, let’s think about what the corresponding declarative sentence would be: imagine the situation where we’re answering each question with a full sentence.
Ramesh is cooking samosas.
He is cooking for Leela.
He bought the ingredients at the store.
Our theory claims that in the Deep Structure of a wh-question, the wh-phrase is generated in the position that it would occupy if it were the answer to the question. In other words, the Deep Structure of the sentence, What is Ramesh cooking is really, Ramesh is cooking what. That wh-word what is a pronoun that stands in for the Noun Phrase that refers to what he really is cooking. In the situation where we’re asking this question, we don’t know that the answer to the question is