Abstract
This article is intended to show that empty categories (henceforth, ECs) in
Arabic, specifically, in relative clauses are best handled within the Government-
Binding (GB) framework. It will be demonstrated that early Arab grammarians and
some contemporary Arab linguists are unable to advance an adequate account
of those ECs. As a matter of fact, Arab grammarians analysis of such categories
was vague.
In their analysis of those ECs, early Arab grammarians, implicitly, and contem-
porary Arab grammarians, explicitly, assume two distnict lingusitic levels: syntactic
and semantic. Our approach, using the GB model, proposes a solution to certain
debated issues in relative constructions in Arabic. Furthermore, it is more in
concord with the facts of Arabic.