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42 The frameworksky and Halle’s (1968) The Sound Pattern of English. We focusedour discussion on the long-recognised problem of disjunctivity, that is,{_C and _#}. It has been indicated that neither the traditional theoriesnor GP have been able to successfully capture all the relevant facts relatedto the disjunctive context. In conclusion we pointed out that the StrictCV model could offer a satisfactory solution to the problem of disjunctivity.Next, we pointed to the main drawbacks of the Sonority SequencingPrinciple and concluded that sonority-based theories were doomed to beabandoned. Moreover, some syllabification problems encountered in Englishand Polish along with the proposed solutions offered by previoustheories were briefly discussed. It has been shown that languages fallinto two general groups, where the division is based on word-initial consonantclusters. In order to understand the divergent behaviour of languages,we looked more deeply at the traditional branching onsets inPolish and Czech. It was demonstrated that branching onsets are in facttwo onsets separated by an empty nucleus. The consonants associatedwith such onsets are able to contract a governing relation which is headfinal. The representation of branching onsets together with the idea ofthe active/inactive character of the initial empty CV unit explains whylanguages allow for different word-initial consonant sequences. Moreover,it has been mentioned that the peculiarities of the left margin canbe given a uniform account if we accept Lowenstamm’s (1999) proposalto replace the initial word boundary with an empty CV unit. Theimplementation and consequences of the latter move will be examinedand tested against phonotactics and phonological processes in Polish(Chapter Two) and English (Chapter Three).