This paper will bring some new data to bear on the question of how “overt movement” is to be characterized. I will argue that Probes which trigger overt movement cannot require movement to a position c-commanding them, as standardly assumed. The account will be consistent with accounts like that of Richards (2010; 2016), which only require that movement land in a position which is linearly close to the triggering Probe.

The data will all come from Tagalog. We will see, first, that Tagalog wh-movement is generally obligatorily overt. However, there is a class of wh-phrases in Tagalog (wh-predicates), which I will argue are incapable of overt wh-movement. We will see that wh-predicates can form wh-questions just if they are linearly adjacent to the interrogative complementizer which begins the clause, and that they are never in the structural position occupied by other kinds of wh-moved phrases.

Tagalog is a predicate-initial language. Predicates of any lexical category are typically initial in the clause:

And wh-questions, whether matrix or embedded, may have initial predicates as their wh-phrases:

The boldfaced material in (2–3) actually has two reasons to be initial in the Tagalog clause. Not only are these predicates, in a generally predicate-initial language, but they are wh-phrases, and wh-movement is obligatory in Tagalog:3

But in fact, we will see evidence that wh-predicates in Tagalog are incapable of wh-movement; they must remain in situ. One piece of evidence for this conclusion comes from long-distance wh-questions. It turns out that wh-predicates in Tagalog cannot be extracted long-distance:

Long wh-movement is not generally banned in Tagalog:4

Tagalog wh-predicates, then, are subject to a special restriction; unlike other wh-phrases in Tagalog, they cannot move across clause boundaries.5 Demonstrating that wh-predicates cannot wh-move in monoclausal questions in Tagalog is harder to do, since predicates and wh-phrases are both typically clause-initial. I turn to that task in the next section.

Much of the literature on Tagalog agrees that predicate-initial word order is created by movement of the predicate to a syntactic position higher than the arguments of the clause (Kroeger 1993; Richards 1993; 2000; Rackowski 2002; Aldridge 2004; and much other work). Certain kinds of material can intervene between the fronted predicate and overt complementizers, indicating that the landing site of predicate fronting is not C:

In (6), the predicate of the embedded clause, naintindihan ‘understood’, is separated from the embedding complementizer na by the negative morpheme hindi. Data like (6) have been taken to argue (for example, by Richards 2003 and Aldridge 2004), not only that the landing site of predicate fronting is not C, but that it should not be the sister of C, either; there must be a certain amount of syntactic space between C and the position of the predicate.

Negation is not the only kind of material that can occupy this space. Certain kinds of phrases may be fronted to positions before the predicate, where they are followed by an invariant morpheme ay. Thus, for example, the ordinary word order in (8a) alternates with the inverted one in (8b), and the resulting inverted structure can also appear in embedded clauses, as in (8c):

I will refer to the process in (8b–c), following Schachter and Otanes (1972), as ay-inversion. It is generally optional, and if it has effects on information structure, they are quite subtle. Ay-inverted material precedes negation:

Descriptively, then, the Tagalog clause can begin with at least the following items, in this order:

To this description we may add the landing site of ordinary fronted wh-phrases. In embedded questions, these must precede ay-inverted phrases, and follow the complementizer:

In embedded wh-questions, the order in (11) is the only possible one for these elements. In particular, an ay-fronted phrase cannot intervene between the interrogative complementizer kung and the fronted wh-phrase:

We can think of (12) as an illustration of what it means to say that Tagalog has obligatory wh-fronting; wh-fronting is to a position just to the right of the embedding complementizer kung, and the wh-phrase cannot be separated from this position. We can update the description in (10) as follows:

The description in (13) is not exhaustive; there are other kinds of things that can precede the Tagalog predicate, such as fronted topics and certain kinds of adverbs. But this description will suffice for our purposes.

The fact that the wh-phrase follows the complementizer kung rather than preceding it is surprising on conventional assumptions about the architecture of the clause; if wh-movement lands in the specifier of CP, we should expect the wh-phrase to precede the complementizer. The literature contains several plausible proposals about this problem, any of which would be consistent with the point being made here. Kroeger (1993), Otsuka and Tanaka (2016), and Hsieh (2020) claim that Tagalog wh-movement is to the specifier of a projection below the one headed by kung. Sabbagh (2014) posits wh-movement to the specifier of kung, together with conditions on how Tagalog syntactic structure is mapped onto prosodic structure which guarantee that the wh-phrase must be linearized after the complementizer.

More generally, a natural question to ask at this point would be how the facts in (13) should be represented in a tree. We might consider one extreme in which each of the elements involved occupies its own dedicated maximal projection:6

A logically possible opposite extreme would posit a single projection hosting all of the material after C, perhaps with the predicate occupying the head of the projection, and the rest of the material in various adjunct and specifier positions:

One argument against the radically impoverished structure in (15b) comes from the behavior of ellipsis in Tagalog. Tagalog has sluicing (and Sprouting):

Tagalog also allows ellipsis of the material following negation:

On the other hand, an ay-inverted phrase may not precede an ellipsis site:

In a structure like the one in (14b), the facts in (16–18) are easy to describe: Tagalog can elide ayP and TP, but not NegP.7 In (15b), on the other hand, description is less straightforward. Whether we want to posit all the structure in (14b) is unclear, but at least with our current understanding of how ellipsis is licensed, it is hard to see how the structurally impoverished structure in (15b) can be the right one.

We now seem to have found a kind of case in which the position of the predicate and the position of a fronted wh-phrase can be linearly (and, I have just argued, structurally) distinguished; material can intervene between these two positions. Where does a wh-predicate appear?

The fact is that wh-predicates are incompatible with ay-inversion in embedded questions:

Neither of the orders in (19) is possible.8 We can relate the ill-formedness of (19a) to the contrast in (11–12), repeated here as (20):

As (20) reminds us, we have already seen that wh-phrases cannot be separated from the complementizer by ay-inverted phrases. But in (19b), we can see that fronting the wh-predicate across the ay-inverted phrase is also unacceptable. The ill-formedness of (19b) is reminiscent of the facts in (5), repeated as (21):

Wh-predicates, like other wh-phrases, must be adjacent to the interrogative complementizer, but in every case in which fronting a wh-predicate would not be string-vacuous, fronting is blocked; they cannot front across clause boundaries, as (21) shows, but they also cannot front within their clause, as we see in (19).9

The facts in matrix wh-questions are somewhat more complicated. Here it is possible for ay-inverted phrases to precede wh-predicates:10

We might understand the fact in (22) as telling us that Tagalog is like many languages in having kinds of movement to the left periphery which are restricted to root clauses; in this particular case, we would say, ay-inversion takes place to a higher position than it could in an embedded question, landing above the (null) complementizer and allowing the linear adjacency requirement between C and the wh-predicate to be satisfied.11

The second movement step in (23) would be the one which is banned in embedded clauses but licit in matrix questions.12 The question of why such root phenomena should exist, in Tagalog or any other language, is a very interesting one that lies beyond the scope of this paper;13 for further discussion of root phenomena in other languages, see Emonds (1969; 2004), Bianchi and Frascarelli (2010), Haegeman (2012), Jiménez-Fernández and Miyagawa (2014), Miyagawa (2022), and much other work.

Putting matrix questions aside, then, let us review what the facts of embedded questions seem to teach us.

We have now seen evidence that the boldfaced wh-phrases in (24) are in different syntactic positions. Saan ‘where’ in (24a) is in a comparatively high structural position, preceding the positions of negation and ay-inverted phrases. The predicate wh-phrase na-saan ‘pred-where’ in (24b), on the other hand, is in a comparatively low structural position, the predicate-initial position typically occupied by predicates. In fact, we have seen that wh-predicates cannot move to any position higher than the one generally occupied by predicates.14

The description in (25) covers the data under discussion:

On this view, the wh-phrase in (24a) satisfies (25) via actual wh-movement, while the wh-phrase in (24b) satisfies (25) because of the general processes that typically make predicates initial in Tagalog. In fact, we have now seen that if a wh-predicate cannot satisfy (25) while staying in the ordinary position of predicates, then (25) is violated and the result is ill-formed; wh-predicates cannot undergo the kind of wh-movement that we see in (24a).

The condition in (25) would be a natural consequence of an approach to overt movement like that in Richards (2010; 2016). In that theory, overt movement takes place because of conditions that require Probes and Goals to share prosodic structures of certain kinds. I claim that the construction of prosodic structure begins earlier in the derivation than we have classically believed, and that operations in the narrow syntax can be driven by the need to improve the prosodic representation. The approach posits a requirement that the smallest string containing C and the wh-phrase have the wh-phrase as its most prosodically prominent element. In languages like Tagalog, I claim, the most prosodically prominent element is the leftmost phrase in a given string.15 The upshot of this would be that in the smallest string containing C and the wh-phrase, the wh-phrase must be the leftmost phrase. A wh-phrase which immediately follows C will obey this condition, regardless of how much syntactic structure intervenes between them, as long as no phrase is pronounced between C and the wh-phrase. On this kind of account, then, we expect to find generalizations like (25).

Generalizations like (25) are not the mainstream way of understanding overt movement. On standard approaches, overt movement takes place because of features on a head which require that head to have a specifier (often, a Goal with which a Probe on the head has Agreed). Wh-movement takes place, on this view, because a particular head demands a specifier, and we never expect to find a wh-phrase in any syntactic position other than the specifier of that head. Can some version of this kind of approach account for the Tagalog data?

It is always dangerous to bet against the ingenuity of future syntacticians, of course, but it is difficult to see how any account of this kind can succeed. This is particularly clear if we are justified in positing anything like the structurally rich approach represented in the tree in (13b); ordinary wh-movement in Tagalog lands in the specifier of one kind of functional projection, and predicate wh-phrases reside in a completely distinct functional projection, and the two are separated by some structural distance.16 It is hard to see how a single structural condition could cover all the cases.

The best generalization about Tagalog wh-questions appears to be that the wh-phrase must immediately linearly follow the interrogative complementizer.17 For most wh-phrases, this requirement is satisfied by wh-fronting, which lands in a position to the right of the complementizer and to the left of negation and ay-inverted phrases. Such wh-fronting is generally obligatory in Tagalog, as we have seen. But we have also learned that wh-predicates must satisfy the general condition on wh-questions in Tagalog in a different way; they must be linearly adjacent to the interrogative complementizer, but they cannot move in order to get there, even if the movement would only take them past an intervening ay-phrase. In other words, the requirement that wh-movement must be overt in Tagalog cannot be associated with a particular syntactic position; fronted wh-phrases and wh-predicates do not occupy the same syntactic position (the ay-inverted phrase intervenes between them), but both can (and must) satisfy the condition on wh-phrases in Tagalog. An account of the standard kind, which says that wh-fronting is obligatory in some languages because a particular head demands that the wh-phrase land in its specifier, appears to fail for Tagalog. Overt wh-movement is obligatory in Tagalog, but there is no single structural position occupied by all Tagalog wh-phrases. We are used to saying that wh-movement is driven by a need to fill the specifier of CP, but I have argued that this is a mistake. Wh-movement, if I am right, is driven by a need to make sure that a particular domain has a wh-phrase at its linear left edge, regardless of where that left edge appears in syntactic structure.