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This article investigates the way Persian relative clause construction is derived based on move alpha as developed in Government and Binding (GB) theory (Chomsky, 1981,1986). Within GB theory, it has been widely discussed that relative clauses themselves are CPs, commonly with an operator element of some type raised to the [Spec; CP] from a position within the IP complement of C. This may be an overt relative pronoun in many languages (e.g., English), however in the absence of such an overt constituent, enough syntactic conditions and linguistic facts provide good evidence to assume a null operator undergoing the same type of movement. Therefore, in order to determine the specific way of deriving relative construction in Persian, this study proposes two hypotheses: (1) 'ke'-movement hypothesis, and (2) empty operator movement hypothesis. 'Ke'-movement hypothesis is assumed to be like the application of (overt) wh-movement involved in English relative clauses, whereby the element 'ke' appears as a wh-phrase. However, various linguistic facts about Persian relativization strongly suggest that there is no overt wh-movement in its relative caluse derivation. In this regard, it will be argued that wh-movement in the form of 'ke'-movement does not target what appears to resemble an overt relative pronoun, but rather raises an empty operator. In fact, 'ke'-movement approach does not capture any generalization in deriving different types of relative clauses in Persian. This hypothesis fails to account for those relative constructions with resumptive pronouns. On the other hand, the analysis based on empty operator movement hypothesis provides an appropriate generalization for the formation of different relative clauses containing either gaps or resumptive pronouns. In this alternative approach, Persian relative clause is analyzed as a CP with a null operator which is assumed to move from different syntactic positions and to occupy the [Spec;CP]. Furthermore, the constituent 'ke' does not appear as a relative pronoun but as a complementizer.

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XVII International Congress of Linguists, Prague, Czech Republic, July 24-29, 2003.