whfronted

Whfronted, more commonly called wh-fronting or wh-movement, is a syntactic phenomenon in which a wh-word (such as who, what, where, or how) is moved to the front of a clause. This movement is used to form questions, relative clauses, and some other dependency structures, by linking a fronted element to its original position inside the clause.

In English and many other languages, the wh-word originates within a lower clause but is displaced to the left edge of the clause, leaving behind a trace or a null position. In questions, this fronting is often accompanied by auxiliary or tense word reordering, as in What did you see? In other languages, the specifics vary: some allow long-distance extraction across multiple clauses, while others impose restrictions such as islands, which block certain extractions.

Typologically, wh-fronting is widespread in languages with overt wh-words and movement to a high clause periphery (often the Spec-CP position). It contrasts with wh-in-situ languages, where the wh-word remains in a fixed position and the question is marked by intonation or particles rather than fronting. German and Dutch, for example, typically place the wh-word at the beginning of the clause with the finite verb in its characteristic position, while languages like Mandarin Chinese use wh-words in-situ, relying on other cues to indicate a question.

Historically, wh-fronting has been central to generative grammar since the mid-20th century, shaping theories of movement, locality, and dependency. It remains a key diagnostic for cross-linguistic syntax and for testing theoretical accounts of how language structures are constructed and interpreted.