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24 The frameworkWhat is interesting, however, is the fact that internal empty nuclei neveract as government-licensors in English. In consequence, GP is obligedto recognise two different kinds of empty nuclei, i.e. word-internaland final. This move was considered as a serious drawback and hencefaced strong criticism (see Rowicka 1999a, b, Polgárdi 1998, 1999,2002, Dienes and Szigetvári 1999, Szigetvári 1999, 2001).Interestingly enough, the weakest point of the solution offered by GP isthe claim that word-final consonants never act as codas but are onsetsinstead. Note that although there are a number of phenomena in differentlanguages which irrefutably show that internal codas do not patternwith word-final consonants (Harris and Gussmann 1998,2002), the claim that word-final consonants are always onsets is toostrong. The post-Kahnian period has gathered satisfactory evidence, bothstatic distributional and concerning various processes, which point tothe fact that word-internal codas and word-final consonants behave alike(see Scheer 2004). To sum up, GP seems to be unable to refer to thetraditional context {_C and _#} in a non-disjunctive fashion. 11 What isneeded, therefore, is a theory which is ‘able to do both: capture the codacontext as a non-disjunctive object and make a difference between wordfinaland pre-consonantal consonants’ (Scheer 2004:606). The immediateconclusion drawn from the discussion above is that GP has managedto achieve the second part only, that is, by postulating word-finalonsets it has captured the observation that word-final consonants do notbehave like internal codas. A way out of the impasse becomes availablein the model which does not recognise arboreal syllable structure, thatis, the Strict CV approach. The latter model breaks the vicious circle bygetting rid of syllabic constituents and shifting the load onto lateral relations,which can be parameterised. Very briefly, the reason why bothinternal codas and word-final consonants behave alike falls out naturallyfrom the fact that both objects appear before an empty nucleus. Thefact that in certain cases both objects do not pattern is captured by theparameterisation of the lateral potential of final empty nuclei. In otherwords, the difference between internal and final empty nuclei boils downto the fact that the former can neither license nor govern, while the lateral11As was pointed out to me by Eugeniusz Cyran, it is not true that GP cannot referto this context in a non-disjunctive fashion because according to Harris’ (1997) LicensingInheritance Theory both contexts are weak. It seems that what is problematic hereis the terminology mismatch. Note that domain-internal codas are called post-nuclearrhymal complements while domain-final consonants are onsets. It follows that thereare two classes of onsets, those which are prosodically weak (domain-final) and thosewhich are strong (domain-internal).