Chomsky’s “Derivation by Phase” proposes an analysis of Scandinavian Object Shift (OS) that capitalises on two main assumptions: (i) there exist special spell-out operations that are independent of phase completion (Disl); and (ii) “Holmberg’s Generalisation”, as formulated in Holmberg (1999), reduces to the presence (or absence) of phonological features c-commanding the shiftable object in Narrow Syntax. The present paper argues that (i) and (ii) also play an important role in German scrambling, a phenomenon partially resembling OS (Diesing, 1997, among others). With respect to (i), it is claimed that the existence of Disl finds empirical support in the inconsistent islandhood of scrambled coherent infinitives (Grewendorf & Sabel, 1994; Müller, 1998; etc.). With respect to (ii), it is proposed that it may account for three traditional observations: (a) the asymmetry between monotransitive and ditransitive predicates regarding the unmarked word order; (b) the link between scrambling and head-finalness; (c) the restrictions affecting the reordering of “verbnahe” elements.