Abstract
It has been argued in the literature (George (1980), Chomsky (1986), Agbayani (2000, 2006), among others) that a movement operation without an effect on PF output can be suspended. This is known as the vacuous movement hypothesis. In this paper, it is shown, based on recent minimalist frameworks (Chomsky (2000, 2001, 2004, 2008)), that the vacuous movement hypothesis is reducible to an explanatory system in which the mechanism of feature inheritance operates not only on the Agree feature but also on the edge feature, which draws on clausal typing (Cheng (1997a)). The proposed system is also shown to have favorable consequences and implications.
