Wh-Subjects in English and the Vacuous Movement Hypothesis

Abstract

In this squib I consider the Vacuous Movement Hypothesis (henceforth VMH), the notion that in English local overt wh-movement takes place except for subjects (George 1980, Chomsky 1986). There is considerable evidence that a wh-subject does not move locally to [Spec, CP] in English. However, the notion that overt wh-movement in English involves feature licensing/clausal typing with C (Rizzi 1996, Cheng 1991) implies that even in the case of wh-subjects, movement to the domain of C must still occur. Furthermore, wh-islands involving a wh-subject in the embedded clause have raised problems for the VMH under the classical treatment of wh-islands that attributes them to Subjacency. I propose to reconcile the evidence for and against the VMH via a simplification of the feature-checking system advanced in Chomsky 1995 and a treatment of overt movement that separates a feature chain (CH_FF) from a category chain (CH_CAT). The proposal resolves the discrepancies observed with English wh-subjects in a conceptually desirable way.