The central question in the study of verbal meaning are what the basic component’s of a verb’s meaning are and how they compose together into more complex meanings in ways that make predictions about possible and impossible verbs. Event structural theories have been arguably the dominant approach to the study of verb meaning over the last 50 years. On such approaches a verb’s meaning is assumed to decompose into an event template capturing the verb’s broad temporal and causal contours that groups verbs into semantically unified classes, and an idiosyncratic semantic root naming specific actions and states for a given verb within a class. A common assumption is that there is a division of labor in the grammatical properties of templates vs. roots: event templates largely determine the verb’s grammatical properties (e.g. its argument structure and derivational morphology) while the root mainly just figures into its idiosyncratic form. On such approaches argument alternations thus generally thought to reflect a single root that occurs in two templates, where the variation in templates is what derives the morphosyntactic details of the argument structure and its semantic effects.

However, it is well known that roots can condition what alternations they occur in, though there is little consensus in prior work on how this is done. In this talk I present joint work with Kyle Jerro and Andrew Koontz-Garboden on applicatives in Kinyarwanda that addresses this question directly. Applicatives are standardly thought to introduce additional event structural material into the event structure of the base verb in a fairly monotonic fashion, always ensuring that the applicativized verb has essentially the same meaning as the non-applicativized variant but with an extra argument bearing an extra role not found in the meaning of the base verb. I show that the applicative responsible for deriving the dative alternation in Kinyarwanda produces a much wider range of argument alternation.