Replication Data for: Romanian plăcea ‘like’: An Alternating Dat-Nom/Nom-Dat Verb

<p> 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 <i>plăcea</i> ‘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 <i>plăcea</i> ‘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 <i>plăcea</i> ‘like’, and as a control, also for the verb <i>mulțumi</i> ‘thank’, which is an unambiguous Nom-Dat verb. </p>
<p> 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>