The strategies of relative clause formation in English and Arabic : a contrastive study

الملخص EN

This study is an endeavour to find out the strategies of relative clause formation in both English and*Arabic and to discover as well the default strategy (the common one) in each language.

The study has shown that there are two strategies used in the formation of relative clauses: the resumptive pronoun strategy and the gap strategy.

Each one has its own principles and properties by which it is recognized.

The study has also shown that the two languages vary in the exploitation of these two strategies: while Arabic tends to use the resumptive pronoun strategy, English uses the gap theory more extensively-this is basically attributed to the nature of each language.