Agent entailments in the semantics of roots

Many recent theories of event structure (e.g. Hale and Keyser 2002; Borer 2005; Ramchand 2008; Alexiadou et al. 2015) assume that verb meanings decompose into event templates (e.g. vBECOME, vDO) and roots (e.g. √KILL,√DIE). Crucially, under such theories, templatic meanings related to change or intentionality are never introduced by roots, but only by event templates (i.e. vBECOME, vDO respectively), as roots are assumed to provide real-world details about the event. In the present paper I argue, following Beavers and Koontz-Garboden (to appear), that there are certain classes of roots that inherently comprise as part of their entailments the meanings that some theoretical approaches assume to be part of templatic meanings introduced in the syntax by projections such as vDO (Folli and Harley 2005, 2007). More specifically, I make use of sublexical modification with again in order to show that templatic meanings related to intentionality cannot be severed from √MURDER-type roots (i.e. √MURDER,√SLAY,√ASSASSINATE,√SLAUGHTER,√MASSACRE), i.e. that entailments of intentionality are introduced by √MURDER-type roots.