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 ((205)) could be answered by either a clause as in ((206)) or an NP as in ((207)). The extracted NP in these trees is constrained to be <wh>=+, since sentential complements can not be topicalized.

(204)0(204

(205)

What does Clove want?  (205)0(205

(206)

for Beth Ann to play frisbee with her  (206)0(206

(207)

a biscuit