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 whsubject 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.I thank Cedric Boeckx, Toru Ishii, and an LI reviewer for helpful comments.

We show that Classical Greek HYPERBATON involves pervasive phonological movement. Hyperbaton moves prosodic constituents to prosodic positions, subject to prosodic boundaries and to prosodic conditions on well-formedness. Syntactic analyses of hyperbaton fail insofar as they require the movement of heads, phrases, and nonconstituents to positions that are difficult to define syntactically. Furthermore, hyperbaton disobeys anti-locality constraints and a host of well-studied syntactic island conditions. We propose that phonological movement arises as the result of constraint interaction in the phonological component, subsequent to the interface between syntax and phonology.*

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We document a fronting process in Latin that is difficult to model as syntactic movement but fairly easy to model as phonological movement. Movement with similar properties has been observed elsewhere in Classical Greek, Russian, Irish and Japanese; we suggest that the Latin movement is of the same type and takes place in the phonological component of the grammar, following the mapping from syntactic to prosodic structure.

English Pseudogapping constructions share some surface similarities with both Gapping and Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE). Levin (1978Levin ( , 1979 concludes, however, that Pseudogapping is transformationally unrelated to both Gapping and VPE. We argue that this conclusion is only partially correct. Gapping and Pseudogapping are transformationally related in that they both involve the application of verb movement, in particular sideward movement of the main verb. We take Johnson's (1994) ATB Movement analysis of Gapping as an important precedent in this regard, and we draw from proposals of Nunes (2001) and Nunes and Uriagereka (2000) for the possibility of sideward movement out of coordinate structures and adjunct clauses. After pursuing the sideward movement approach to Pseudogapping (and ultimately Gapping as well), we outline some important empirical differences between Pseudogapping and VPE that we think raise substantial problems for any analysis that treats Pseudogapping and VPE on a par (e.g., Jayaseelan 1990, Lasnik 1995, 1999a, 1999b. We present evidence for a fundamental syntactic difference between Pseudogapping and VPE, and conclude that the VPE analysis of Pseudogapping cannot be maintained.