Latin placēre ‘like, please’ as an alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat verb

A general assumption in the Latin scholarship is that verbs like placēre ‘like, please’ select for a nominative (stimulus) subject and a dative (experiencer) object. Here we pursue an alternative hypothesis, namely that placēre may instantiate two diametrically opposed argument structures, i.e. Dat-Nom and Nom-Dat, as recent research has established the existence of such alternations in several Indo- European languages (Barðdal 2023: Ch. 3). For this purpose, we extract 344 tokens of placēre from the LatinISE corpus and code these for case, word order, animacy, (pro)nominality, local vs. non-local pronouns and length. We also apply six different subject tests on the extracted material, which confirms our hypothesis that either the dative or the nominative of placēre behaves syntactically as a subject and the other argument as an object, although not at the same time, of course. A series of bivariate tests reveals that tokens with double NPs, as well as tokens with animate datives joined with inanimate nominatives, are most conducive to the alternation. Pronominal and longish constituents, irrespective of case marking, skew frequencies towards either the Dat-Nom or the Nom-Dat end of the spectrum

Linguistics · Verb · Historical and Linguistic Studies · Linguistics and language evolution · Philosophy

• Romanian plăcea ‘like’

  Open Access•Mihaela Ilioaia, Marleen Van Peteghem et al.•Probus•2025

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