Rethinking the Tobler-Mussafia Law

Abstract

It has been argued repeatedly that the Old Romance clitics are phrasal in character and obey a Romance version of the Wackernagel law, i.e. the Tobler-Mussafia law (cf. Tobler 1875; Mussafia 1888). This law has been interpreted as a constraint that forbids clitics to appear in initial position, due to their status as phonologically enclitic elements, and it was often taken as the explanation of why Old Romance clitics could follow the verb in matrix sentences but never in embedded sentences. Under this view the change in clitic placement from Old to Modern Romance was explained with a change in the categorial status of the clitic itself, i.e. as long as clitics were moving as phrases the ban on clitic-first orders was active and thus clitics were sometimes forced to follow the verb in matrix sentences. Old Catalan clitics contradict this view. They precede and follow the verb in matrix as well as in embedded sentences even though they need to be analyzed as heads from the beginning onwards. In this paper I argue that the change in clitic placement is neither connected to the clitics’ phrasal character nor to their obedience to the Tobler-Mussafia law, but that it is the parameter determining the relative order between verb and clitic that has changed its value in the development from Old to Modern Catalan. The data I present is taken from a corpus of more than 7000 sentences covering the last eight centuries.

The Bantu-Romance-Greek connection revisited: Processing constraints in auxiliary and clitic placement from a cross-linguistic perspective

“…Standard Modern Greek, Italian, Spanish) have often been proposed to have derived from earlier Type B systems -those in which clitic positioning is dependent on the presence (or absence) of one of a number of elements at the left periphery. Type B clitic systems, as already noted, are commonly referred to as Tobler-Mussafia systems (see, for example, Salvi 1993;Fontana 1997;Fischer 2003).…”