Untitled

70 The phonological nature of the beginning of the wordonset, viz, /brPn/¹æ. This means that the initial branching onset /brP/ isgovernment-licensed by the following empty nucleus. In most languages,according to Charette (1992), only full vowels are qualified to governmentlicense, while in others final empty nuclei may also performthis action, e.g. French and Icelandic. Polish is an extreme case as itallows its word-internal governed empty nuclei to act as government licensors.A similar solution is put forward in Cyran and Gussmann(1999); the only difference is that the government licensing comes froma different source, i.e. from the head of the domain, and not as in Charette’s(1992) account from the nucleus directly following a given governingdomain.Charette’s (1991, 1992) proposal of parameterised licensing abilitiesof various vocalic objects, has been taken up and developed by C y -ran (2003). Although in his work the traditional branching onsets arerepresented as two onsets separated by an empty nucleus, as he worksin the Strict CV approach, they are said to contract a rightward Interonset(RIO) relation which may be sponsored by an empty nucleus in Polish.This is illustrated graphically in (26) on the already familiar examplebrn¹æ.(26) GLC|bV 1P→RIOC|rV 2|PC|nV 3|oC|­V 4|PC|t¡¡‚V 5|PNote that in (26) the V 2is not properly governed as Cyran (2003) doesnot grant Proper Government a theoretical status. The ungrammaticalityof two empty nuclei in a row is resolved, according to Cyran (2003),by the constraint *P-P (see also Rowicka 1999a for a similar solution).Crucially, this constraint applies only to unlocked nuclei. 19 In (26) thenuclear position V 1is locked as it appears in the governing relation, thatis, /bPr/, hence the *P-P constraint is not violated. Summing up, Polish isexceptional in the sense that it allows word-internal empty nuclei to licensegoverning domains.Trying to find a logical explanation for the issue depicted above, weshould, first of all, emphasise the fact that trapped consonants seem problematicfor the model developed in this book. The mechanisms which19Unlocked nuclei are those which do not appear in the domain of the consonantalinteraction like rightward or leftward Interonset relations.