Prosody and clitic placement in old and modern Spanish

What is it about?

In modern Castilian Spanish, clitic pronouns are positioned in front of the finite verb and may therefore end up in sentence-initial position. In old Spanish main clauses, clitics are often placed after the finite verb, and rarely occur sentence-initially. This placement pattern is linked to the so-called Tobler-Mussafia Law. A popular motivation for this placement pattern is a prosodic rule which bans unstressed words from the sentence-initial position. If this is true, old Spanish should tolerate less unstressed material at the beginning of the sentence than modern Spanish does. As the empirical comparison reveals the opposite, a prosodic motivation for the Tobler-Mussafia Law seems highly implausible.

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Why is it important?

The explanation and motivation of the Tobler-Mussafia Law is a long-disputed topic not only in Romance linguistics. There are a number of alternative non-prosodic accounts for the respective clitic placement patterns, but prosodic motivations are still popular. As far as I know, this is the first study that compares the prosodic patterns of related +TM and -TM varieties directly in order to test whether the prosodic motivation is empirically plausible.