This section discusses wh-movement in so-called wh-questions. Section 11.3.1.1 starts with a discussion of wh-questions such as given in (91), in which the wh-phrase is moved into the initial position of its own clause. We will show that this movement is motivated by the need to form operator-variable chains in the sense of predicate calculus.

Other issues that will be discussed in Section 11.3.1.1 are the obligatoriness of wh-movement in wh-questions, pied piping (the fact that wh-movement sometimes also affects non-interrogative material that is part of the clausal constituent that includes the wh-element), and stranding (the fact that wh-movement sometimes does not affect non-interrogative material that is part of the clausal constituent that includes the wh-element).

      Section 11.3.1.2 continues with a discussion of so-called long wh-movement, that is, cases in which a wh-phrase is extracted from an embedded clause, as in (93a). There are several restrictions on this type of wh-extraction. For example, while long wh-movement is fully acceptable from object clauses selected by a verb of saying, it gives rise to a degraded result if the object clause is selected by a factive verb such as betreuren'to regret;' see the contrast between the examples in (93a&b). Furthermore, long wh-movement is completely impossible from adverbial clauses such as (93c). We will discuss a number of factors that may affect the acceptability of this type of long wh-movement.

      It should be noted that examples like (93c) cannot be saved by pied piping of the adverbial clause: sentence (94a) is infelicitous as a wh-question despite the fact that the same sentence is fully acceptable (with a different intonation contour) if wat is interpreted as an existential pronoun, as in (94b).

The unacceptability of both (93c) and (94a) thus shows that in certain syntactic environments a wh-element may be inaccessible for wh-movement, as a result of which certain questions which can easily be expressed in predicate calculus simply cannot be formulated in natural language by run-of-the-mill wh-movement. Section 11.3.1.3 will briefly discuss a set of such syntactic environments in which a wh-elements are inaccessible for wh-movement, which are often referred to as islands.
      Section 11.3.1.4 concludes with a discussion of so-called multiple wh-questions, that is, questions with more that one wh-phrase. We will discuss the semantics of such constructions as well as a number of restrictions on their form.