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Left margin in Polish47Thus, it appears that in Polish #TR clusters are not automaticallyrecognised as the Infrasegmental relations. Clusters of this type happento be separated by the alternating vowel [e]. Since alternating vowelsare lexically present, the relation between both consonants cannot becontracted, and instead Proper Government applies, making both consonantsappear together phonetically. Additionally, we have seen that thetraditionally problematic sequences, i.e. #RT, and the two-obstruent clustersare given identical explanation, that is, they are separated by theproperly governed nucleus. Polish combinatorial possibilities discussedin this section are possible due to the inactive character of the initial CVunit. The reason why such clusters are absent from Germanic languages,for example, is the fact that in those languages the initial CVsite is active, making it impossible to have the governed empty nucleusbetween the first two consonants of the word. We will now look at thetwo consonant clusters in the context of prefixation in Polish. It will bedemonstrated that prefixation can tell us a lot about the character ofconsonant clusters.2.1. Prefixation and the consonant clustersIn this section we focus our discussion on the consonant clusters in thecontext of prefixation. The results we arrive at further confirm the choiceof the phonological model applied in this book. Moreover, referring tothe discussion in the previous section we will demonstrate another contextin which what seems to be the IG domain is in fact a sequence of twoonsets separated by the governed empty nucleus, i.e. a #TR sequencewithout the communication between the consonants. The results will thenbe confirmed by similar examples from closely-related Czech. In the previoussection we only briefly mentioned the #RT clusters at the left edgein Polish. Section 2.3 provides a more thorough and in-depth analysis ofsuch combinations in Polish.There is a considerable amount of literature devoted to the vowel —zero alternation in Polish (Gussmann 1980a, Rubach 1984, 1986,Spencer 1986, Szpyra 1992a, Piotrowski 1992a, 1992b, Piotrowski,Roca and Spencer 1992, Rowicka 1999a, amongothers). The phenomenon is so common in Polish (and Slavic languagesin general) due to the historical process known as the weakening of theshort vowels u/i, the so-called jers (Lehr-Sp³awiñski 1957, Stiebe r 1973, 1979). Eventually they disappeared completely in certain posi-