Four Romanian verbs of occurring

This article examines four verbs of occurring in Romanian focusing on the relation between argument structure and verb meaning, the effect of verb meaning on argument selection and the consequences of these syntactic and semantic factors on use. In terms of argument structure, the verbs range from intransitive to transitive. The study revealed the following tendency: an increase in the complexity of the argument structure correlates with a corresponding increase in the semantic complexity of the verb together with a decrease in the semantic contribution of the arguments. An analysis of online data suggests that the syntactically and semantically more complex verbs have acquired specific pragmatic functions. Keywords: transitivity; existential verbs; event arguments; argument realization; expletive clitic object; information structure