An influential proposal about the status of a verb's agent argument maintains they are severed from the verb's argument structure and introduced as external arguments via functional heads in the syntax (Kratzer 1996). Nonetheless, there are various conceptual and empirical arguments against this view (e.g.

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Since Marantz (1984) and Kratzer (1996), it has been widely accepted in the literature on argument structure that agents are introduced as external arguments via a functional head VOICE through secondary predication, using semantic composition rules like EVENT IDENTIFICATION. The widely cited evidence for such a position is the fact that while internal arguments can condition special semantic interpretations of the surface verb, agents never do. In this paper, we present evidence against such a view, arguing that a well-defined class of verbs can impose intentionality entailments and also require representation of the agent argument internally within their lexical semantics. The crucial empirical evidence we utilize is modification by again, specifically the range of available repetitive presuppositions it can introduce. We show that again behaves differently with respect to how its repetitive presupposition can be satisfied by verbal roots whose agent argument is introduced externally versus verbal roots that must entail intentionality and representation of its agent argument. Together with widely accepted assumptions about the syntax and semantics of again-modification, we argue that not all external arguments can be severed from the verbal root.

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A major challenge for event structural theories that decompose verbs into event templates and roots relates to the syntactic distribution of roots and what types of event structures roots can be integrated into. Ontological Approaches propose roots fall into semantic classes, such as manner versus result, which determine root distribution (Rappaport Hovav and Levin 1998, 2010). Free Distribution Approaches, in contrast, hold that root distribution is not constrained by semantic content and roots are free to integrate into various types of event structures (Borer 2005; Acedo-Matellán and Mateu 2014). We focus on two different classes of verbs classified as result verbs in Rappaport Hovav and Levin’s (1998, 2010) sense and their ability to appear in resultative constructions. We build on Beavers and Koontz-Garboden’s (2012, 2020) proposal that the roots underlying these verbs fall into two classes: property concept roots, which denote relations between individuals and states, and change-of-state roots, which on our proposal, denote relations between individuals and events of change. We show that change-of-state roots, but not property concept roots, are able to appear in the modifier position of resultative constructions by providing naturally occurring examples of such resultatives. Combining the proposed lexical semantics of these two classes of roots with a reformulation of an Ontological Approach solely dependent on a root’s semantic type, we show that this analysis makes novel and accurate predictions about the possibility of the two classes of roots appearing in resultative constructions and the range of interpretations available when change-of-state roots are integrated into resultative event structure templates.