Romanian plăcea ‘like’: an alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verb

Abstract 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.