 There is independent evidence for “covert” transformations—displacement of expressions from their audible positions, as in (28L); see Huang (1995), Hornstein (1995). Consider ‘Jean a vu qui’, which is the French translation of ‘Who did John see’. If we assume that ‘qui’ (‘who’) is displaced at LF, then we can explain why the question-word is understood in both French and English like a quantifier binding a variable: which person \(x\) is such that John saw \(x\)? Similarly, example (30) from Chinese is transliterated as in (31).