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30 The frameworkobstruents followed by non-homorganic, non-nasal sonorants. Note, however,that such a constraint does not try to explain why things are theway they are, in other words, why in English only #TR clusters are allowedinitially, while #RT clusters are banned, or why [tl] cannot starta word but is perfectly possible in the word-medial position.What is crucial for our discussion, however, is the fact that Englishwithout exception lacks word-initial #RT clusters. Surprisingly enough,the lack of such clusters hardly ever bothered anyone. Quite conversely,their lack positively confirmed the legitimacy of the Sonority SequencingPrinciple. This is not to say that the problematic initial consonantclusters, i.e. #RT, which violate SSP were not recognised and discussedin the literature. There are plenty of studies concerned with such problematicclusters, for example, in Polish or Czech, not to mention in languagesoutside the Indo-European family. However, the existence of suchclusters in certain languages has always been treated as some sort ofmisbehaviour as far as SSP is concerned. Phonologists have tried to ‘cure’#RT sequences in various ways; sonorants in such clusters were proposedto belong to appendices or to be extrasyllabic; they were conjoinedto some higher prosodic units like Foot or Phonological Word. What isinteresting, however, is that it has always been the #RT clusters whichhave had to be accounted for somehow. This situation may be explainedeasily if we realise that it was SSP which played the major role in thesyllabification and phonotactic studies.One of the languages in question here is Polish, which violates anyversion of SSP. It has long been noted that this language abounds withheavy clusters of various sonority profiles. Moreover, the examples areso frequent that they cannot be swept away as exceptions. In order toexplain Polish consonantal sequences, various stipulations have beenintroduced and heavy machinery has been applied. Quite often such solutionsare language-specific, i.e., they are needed only for the Polishsituation, e.g. the bi-partite structure of Polish onsets (Kury³owicz1952) or word-internal extrasyllabicity (Rubach and Booij 1990a,Rubach 1996, 1997a, b). Complex initial sequences like [drgn-], [tkn-],[fstr-] of drgn¹æ ‘shudder’, tkn¹æ ‘touch’ and wstrêt ‘repulsion’ respectively,have always been a good testing ground for different theoretical frameworks(Kury³owicz 1952, Rubach and Booij 1990a, 1990b,Gussmann 1991, Bethin 1992, Gussmann 1997, Gussmannand Kaye 1993, Gussmann and Cyran 1998, Rowicka 1999a,Cyran and Gussmann 1999, Cyran 2003, Scheer 2004). However,such clusters have proved problematic for most of the analyses.Any scientific theory which wants to be regarded as serious shouldask meaningful questions. Two such questions are why in most of the