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Syllabic consonants101the expansionist behaviour of sonorants, which in turn is a reaction of thelatter to a positional weakness. Moreover, it will be proposed that in English,unlike in Polish, lexically present nuclei are never properly governedeven by the strongest governors, that is, realised vowels. We shall work outa governing-ability scale for different types of nuclei. In the analysis of therelevant facts we shall adopt the lenition theory, which was introduced inChapter Two, that is, the Coda Mirror (Ségéral and Scheer 1999).Crucially, it will be shown that the postulation of the active initial emptyCV unit at the beginning of the word in English and German can predictthe distribution of the structures in question. The latter observation furtherconfirms the idea advocated in the previous chapter, i.e. that the initialempty CV unit is a phonological object which takes part in syllabificationand phonological processes.Generally, this chapter deals with various phenomena which allowus to understand the role of sonorants in syllabification procedures. Thus,apart from syllabic consonants, vowel syncope and bogus clusters, weshall look at the progressive nasal assimilation, final obstruent devoicing,partial geminates and governing abilities of nuclei. The findingsof this chapter point to the possibility for a sonorant to cover a long distancefrom a syllabic consonant to a governing relation with the precedingconsonant. We start the discussion with the presentation of the relevantfacts concerning syllabic consonants.2. Syllabic consonantsThe aim of this section is to present and discuss some basic facts concerningsyllabic consonants in English and German. Although syllabic consonantsdo not seem to have much in common with either vowel syncopeor bogus clusters, the latter two phenomena will also be introduced anddiscussed in the following sections. As the discussion unfolds, it will becomeclear that all the three structures are closely related.In the previous chapter we pointed out some differences and similaritiesbetween syllabic and trapped consonants in Slavic. It was stressedthere that the crucial difference between these structures lies in the directionof branching. Thus, syllabic consonants are found to be left-branchingstructures, while trapped consonants are right-branching ones. Theleft-branching status of syllabic consonants can be independently confirmedby Germanic languages. Thus, in what follows we shall look moreclosely at the relevant data from two related languages, English and