Wh-moved S complement

Except for the node label on the extracted position, the trees for wh-questions on S complements look exactly like the trees for wh-questions on NP's in the same positions. This is because there is no separate wh-lexical item for clauses in English, so the item what is ambiguous between representing a clause or an NP. To illustrate this ambiguity notice that the question in ((153)) could be answered by either a clause as in ((154)) or an NP as in ((155)). The extracted NP in these trees is constrained to be <wh>=+, since sentential complements can not be topicalized.

(152)0(152

(153)

What does Clove want?  (153)0(153

(154)

for Beth Ann to play frisbee with her  (154)0(154

(155)

a biscuit