In this chapter, we have argued for a revision of correspondence theory in which strings rather than segments are the formal objects that stand in correspondence. In this revision, well-behaved unfaithful mappings do not alter ℜ’s status is a total bijective function. Candidates with a less orderly ℜ violate MPARSE; among these candidates there is one that harmonically bounds all of the others, the null output &#;. The primary goal of this project is to explain why &#; uniquely violates no constraints except MPARSE, making it suitable for the analysis of phonologically-conditioned gaps. Along the way, we have also discussed the general properties of MPARSE, the locality of coalescence and breaking, and alternative theories of gaps.