Wh-Subjects in English and the Vacuous Movement Hypothesis

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