Grammars of old Romanian described various types of “double subject” constructions, explained from two sources: an internal one (spoken language structures, in the case of original texts), and an external one (imitations from original texts of various foreign origins). In a discourse analysis perspective, the present article challenges the “double subject” interpretation and argues that the subject is only apparently double. The constructions under scrutiny show a canonic subject and some additional discursive phenomena that result in an opaque linearization, which is misleading due to the lack of prosodic markers in written texts. The apparent “double subject” results from two interrelated phenomena: (a) the transfer of spoken language disfluencies to written texts (in a period when writers were not fully aware of register differences, and register differentiation was not the norm, especially in Romanian culture, but in other cultures too) and (b) various lexical-syntactic topic – focus management strategies (some of them specific to all discourse configurational languages, Latin included, others specific to Romanian, with some of them possibly emerging in the translation process from other languages). Hence, the syntactic subject is attracted in various discursive phenomena which result in the following categories: (i) discontinuous subject, a strategy of topic confirmation; (ii) recurrent subject, a focus confirmation strategy used as affective stance marker; (iii) hanging topic, anaphorically resumed as syntactic subject, which is a strategy of information structure management common to discourse configurational languages, as well as to spoken varieties of configurational languages; (iv) verum focus operator, a strategy specific to Romanian, which varies cross-linguistically; (v) appositive subject with clarification function; (vi) additive focal adverbial, a pronominal device alternative to the focal adverbial și; (vii) continuity marking relator, with a conjunction-like status, syntactically not integrated in the sentence it heads as apparent subject; (viii) focal particle marking affective stance. All these discursive configurations were transmitted to present-day Romanian. What makes the difference is the degree of tolerance for spoken language structures in the written register and speakers’/writers’ higher degree of awareness regarding written language norms. They are all part of information packaging strategies in discourse.