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Description
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This data serves as the basis for the collaborative article titled "Romanian plăcea ‘like’: An Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat Verb", where the alternating status of the verb plăcea ‘like’ is being investigated. In this article, we take SVO to be the canonical word order in Romanian, while being aware of the complexity of the topic, too big to address here (Ilioaia 2023; Pană Dindelegan 2016; cf. also Nicolae 2019). Given this, we predict that, in the case of the verb plăcea ‘like’, both the dative-before-nominative and the nominative-before-dative orders are SVO structures in Romanian, instantiating the two argument structures, Dat-Nom and Nom-Dat, respectively, instead of one of the word orders being a topicalization of the other. To verify this hypothesis, we have carried out a synchronic corpus study, providing word order statistics for the verb plăcea ‘like’, and as a control, also for the verb mulțumi ‘thank’, which is an unambiguous Nom-Dat verb.
Thus, we have collected material for both verbs from the Romanian Web Corpus roTenTen16 (Jakubíček et al. 2013), which consists of 2.6 billion words. We have extracted a sample including the first 200 main clause tokens for each of the two verbs, where these occur with two arguments, a nominative and a dative, at a distance of zero-to-three words. We have only included tokens where the two arguments are represented as either full NPs or strong pronouns, with one of the arguments being preverbal and the other postverbal. Examples where either of the two arguments are pro-dropped are excluded for the simple reason that the arguments are not expressed in such examples, which in turn makes it difficult to exactly decide on their position in the clause.
In addition to the two data files, we include in this dataset codebooks for the respective data files, as well as files containing tables and graphs used in the related publication.
Abstract article: In several Indo-European languages, including Romanian, predicates such as plăcea ‘like' from Latin placēre ‘like, please’, are found selecting for a dative experiencer and a nominative stimulus, which appear to allow for two opposite, but equally neutral, word orders, i.e. dative-before-nominative and nominative-before-dative. This stands in stark contrast with topicalized datives, which are always focal in Romanian. We hypothesize that the two word orders with plăcea represent two diametrically-opposed argument structures, Dat-Nom and Nom-Dat, thus predicting that the dative behaves syntactically as a subject in Dat-Nom structures and the nominative as a subject in Nom-Dat structures. An inspection of seven subject tests, recently applied in the literature on Romanian, reveals that two of these do not distinguish between subjects and objects, while the remaining five confirm that either argument of plăcea, the dative or the nominative, passes the subject tests, with the other argument, the nominative or the dative, behaving as an object. (2025-06-17)
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