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.