The Variety of Syntactic Patterns of Dative Experiencer Verbs in Italian

This article investigates the variety of syntactic constructions characterizing Dative Experiencer verbs in Italian. This psych class, whose representative verb has always been considered piacere ‘appeal’, includes only ten verbs, which in most cases share the inverted structure, i.e. the SVO and the OVS patterns. However, DE verbs display an irregular and idiosyncratic syntactic behaviour, given the abundance of (pronominal/ reflexive) transitive/non-transitive constructions in which they may appear.