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In transformational grammar, a trace is an empty (phonologically null) category that occupies a position in the syntactic structure. It marks the initial position of a linguistic expression that is moved in the course of a transformation.

The statement "I want John to go" is transformed into an 'echo'-question. If "who" is moved to the beginning of the sentence, it will leave a trace. The existence of the trace will make it impossible to contract "want" and "to".

I want John to go. ==> You want whom to go?
                      ^          v
                      |__________|
                       ==> Whom do you want to go?

In Government and binding theory, traces are subject to the Empty Category Principle (ECP), which states that all traces must be "properly governed". Proper government is either theta-government or antecedent-government:

• Who did John say that Mary saw t? (The verb "see" both governs and theta-marks the trace, so the trace is theta-governed.)
• Who t said that? (The wh-word governs the trace and is coindexed with it, so the trace is antecedent-governed.)

However, intermediate traces are not subject to the ECP because they are deleted at LF (logical form).

Traces are a crucial technical ingredient for formal syntactic analysis in transformational frameworks. Empirical evidence pointing to the existence of traces, independently of all theory-specific considerations, has also been presented in the literature. For example, for many English speakers, the contraction of want to to wanna is possible in some contexts, but not in others:

• Which candidate does Vicky want to vote for t? → Which candidate does Vicky wanna vote for?
• Which candidate does Vicky want t to win the election? → *Which candidate does Vicky wanna win the election?

One way to explain this contrast is assume that the trace left behind by the extraction of which candidate in the second example blocks the contraction of want and to. However, the validity of this and similar arguments have been called into question by linguists that favor non-transformational approaches.

• Sag, Ivan A., and Janet Dean Fodor (1994). "Extraction without Traces". In Raul Aranovich, William Byrne, Susanne Preuss, and Martha Senturia (eds), Proceedings of the Thirteenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 365–384.

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