Prosody and object clitic placement: A comparison of Old and Modern Spanish

- The Tobler-Mussafia Law has often been claimed to be motivated by prosodic factors.
- Old Spanish (+TM) should therefore differ prosodically from Modern Spanish (−TM).
- Contrary to expectation, Old Spanish tolerates more initial unstressed syllables.
- Therefore, a prosodic motivation for the TML seems highly unplausible.
- This is in accordance with the Principle of Phonology-free Syntax.

It has often been claimed that the Tobler-Mussafia Law, i.e. the ban on sentence-initial clitic pronouns, is based on prosodic properties such as the ban on unstressed monosyllabic words at the sentence beginning (Mussafia, 1886) or the inherent enclitic nature of the respective pronouns (Meyer-Lübke, 1897). More recent research has identified a number of extra-phonological motivations for this clitic placement, making a prosodic explanation seem superfluous. The present study addresses the question whether Old Spanish, a clear Tobler-Mussafia language, differs in its prosodic patterns from Modern Spanish, which does not show the Tobler-Mussafia placement any longer. The comparison of the data shows that Old Spanish tolerates more sentence-initial unstressed monosyllables and unstressed pretonic syllables at the sentence beginning than Modern Spanish does, contrary to expectations. Together with the observation that the direction of clitic attachment is rather due to the prosodic context (i.e. the immediate preceding or following prosodic words and potential Phonological Phrase boundaries) than to a fixed directionality parameter, this falsifies the hypothesis that the clitic placement pattern in the TML language Old Spanish is due to specific prosodic patterns.