Querying Wh-movement Theory

In Chomkian linguistics, movement has always been an essential operation ingenerating sentences; wh-movement is no exception. In English, wh-questions,indirect questions and comparatives are generated by virtue of wh-movement. Withthe development of TG grammar, the motivation, landing site of wh-movement andconditions on wh-movement are postulated, hence the perfection of wh-movementtheory. Moreover, wh-movement has long been a hot topic in research because of itscomplexity and diversity in one language and among different languages. Researcheson multiple wh-movement, partial wh-movement and wh in-situ are done actively.As for wh in-situ, a seemingly counterexample of wh-movement, many linguists giveexplanations from the perspective of movement, also some linguists explain it fromthe point of view of non-movement, but they still have prior assent to the movementoperation.The author holds that wh-movement theory is not a perfect theory in nature.This study intends to demsonstrate the invalidity of wh-movement theory byelucidating the invalidity of S-structure and D-structure, invalidity of wh-movementsmotivations, invalidity of wh-phrases’ landing site, and redundant consequencesbrought about by wh-movement. S-structure and D-structure where wh-movementfunctions have presupposed the parametric word order of language, divorcing fromthe universal level; as to motivations of wh-movement, it is cyclic that the judgmentof weak or strong feature and interpretable or uninterpretable feature is madeaccording to the phenomenon and then using the judgment to analyze the feature’sdegree of strength and its interpretability; with regard to the landing site, Specifier, itwill be proved to be an invalid position in an XP; and LF wh-movement, conditionson wh-movement, and other syntactic operations accompanying wh-movement giverise to the redundancy of the theory. This research finds that the linguistic data inChomsky’s research is only limited in English, which directly makes his theory inductive rather than deductive. As a result, wh-movement theory is not universal innature. Besides, he is deceived by too many complex and linear phenomena, givingrise to the arbitrariness of his theory, full of phenomenality and fuzziness, violatingthe rigidity requirement in scientific study. Furthermore, too many conditions andother syntactic operations are set to guarantee a well-formed wh-movement sentence,hence the redundancy. Not having abstracted a logical and unified UG grammar fromsuperficial representations, his wh-movement theory betrays the universality,abstractness and economy in theorizing. At last, from the perspective ofnon-movement, the author propose wh in-situ genesis hypothesis, claiming thatwh-phrases are base-generated as Adjuncts to [NP VP[V NP]], the basic logic frameof human language.