Word.ws English Dictionary

wh-in-situ

wh-in-situ noun: the occurrence of a wh-word in its typical syntactic position when forming a wh-question.

Noun

wh-in-situ (uncountable)

  1. The occurrence of a wh-word in its typical syntactic position when forming a wh-question.

Origin of wh-in-situ

Coined by American linguist Joseph E. Aoun in 1981.

Questions about wh-in-situ

What does wh-in-situ mean?
Wh-in-situ means the occurrence of a wh-word in its typical syntactic position when forming a wh-question.
What part of speech is wh-in-situ?
Wh-in-situ is a noun.

Words near wh-in-situ in the dictionary

  1. wh questions
  2. wh*re
  3. wh*res
  4. wh- question
  5. wh- questions
  6. wh-in-situ
  7. wh-island
  8. wh-islands
  9. wh-movement
  10. wh-movements
  11. wh-question

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: wh-in-situ (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “wh-in-situ.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/wh-in-situ. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.