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90 The phonological nature of the beginning of the wordusually ascribed to coda, the former ones should belong to onset. Itis generally accepted that consonants in codas undergo lenition whilethose in onsets are protected from this fate. However, the traditionalsyllabification procedures are of no use here. Note that in GovernmentPhonology the coda as a constituent does not resemble the traditionalcoda whatsoever. In this model the coda is reduced to a post-nuclearrhymal complement which may exist only when followed by an onset(Kaye 1990, Harris and Gussmann 1998, 2002). Thus, inGP word-final consonants are never codas. Furthermore, in the StrictCV model codas as constituents do not gain formal status; they are simplyabsent from the theory. As for the Coda Mirror context, i.e. #_and C._, it is again not possible to associate this disjunctivity with thetraditional onset. This is so because there is another context whichis traditionally recognised as onset, the intervocalic position, but this,unlike the former two, is affected by the lenition rather than the fortitionphenomena. It is generally prone to lenition and hence weak butthe lenition effects it shows are different in kind from those observedin the traditional coda. It follows that the intervocalic position cannotbe an onset (as it is weak) and it cannot be a coda either (different effects).The conclusion drawn from the discussion above is that any theoryof lenition should recognise at least five relevant positions, which arerepresented in (44) below. The diagram is taken from Scheer(2004:116).(44)Position in the stringstrong positionweak positiontraditional coda intervocalic#_ C._ _.C _# V_VSégéral and Scheer (1999) point out that the disjunctive definitionof both the strong and weak contexts can be given a uniform explanationif the strict CV skeleton and Lowenstamm’s (1999) proposalto exchange the boundary marker with the empty CV unit are accepted.Consider first the representation of both the strong (45) and the weakcontext (46), where the relevant positions are underlined.