This paper examines some general properties ofWh-movement in English and Spanish,
with a contrastive focus on inversion in Spanish and EnglishWh-questions. This syntactic
phenomenon has been extensively analyzed from several distinctive viewpoints. In this paper, we
will concentrate on contrastive analysis of English and SpanishWh-question formation with a
focus on distinction between Subject-Auxiliary inversion (SAI), which occurs in root, but does not
apply in embedded questions in English. In Spanish, by contrast, although there is a great deal of
dialectal variation, there is no root/embedded asymmetry inWh-Questions: the auxiliary verb must
follow the interrogative element which appears initially in the sentence, both in matrix as well as
embedded questions.
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