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تسجيل

The Vacuous Movement Hypothesis

المؤلف:  Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng and Norbert Corver

المصدر:  Wh-Movement Moving on

الجزء والصفحة:  C4-P72

2026-10-10

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The Vacuous Movement Hypothesis

In contrast to nonsubject wh-questions in English, subject questions have been notoriously ambiguous as to whether they involve overt wh movement or not. An analysis either with movement (2a) or without movement (2b) would yield the right linear order of elements.

Option (2b) has been explored in the form of the Vacuous Movement Hy pothesis (VMH), first proposed by George (1980) and adopted by Chom sky (1986). The basic intuition of the VMH is stated in (3).

The surface order appears to verify such an analysis. In nonsubject questions, the wh-element is clearly displaced, and auxiliary inversion is observed (4a–b). Subject questions lack both a clear indication that the wh-element has been displaced and a clear indication that inversion has occurred (4c). Moreover, nonemphatic subject questions conspicuously lack do-support (4d).

Given the linear pattern, the logic of the VMH becomes clear in light of language acquisition: if a child acquiring the language does not have physically detectable evidence for the application of a transformation in a particular structure, then it is plausible that the child does not posit the application of the transformation in that structure. The following subsections consider the VMH in (3) in relation to facts that are independent of the linear order of elements.