legalese - Is "murder" a noun or verb in "Mr Putin is guilty of conspiracy to murder"?

From The Telegraph's live feed on the ruling in the Litvinenko case:

Emmerson says report findings mean Mr Putin is guilty of conspiracy to murder and should be held to account.

Is this word murder a verb, like steal in "a desire to steal"? I mean, rephrasable to "conspiracy to murder someone"?

Or is it a noun, but with no article used because it's part of a set expression in legalese? I mean, could we rephrase it as "conspiracy to a murder" or "conspiracy to commit a murder"?

Answer

It is a verb. There's a simple test we can do, which is to see whether this word can take an Object. Verbs can take Objects, but nouns can't.

Sometimes nouns describe actions instead of things. These actions often have somebody who does the action and somebody or something that the action is done to. We normally show the person or thing that the action is done to using a preposition phrase headed by the preposition of. We can show the person or things doing the action with a preposition phrase headed by by. But we cannot try to give the noun an Object. This will be ungrammatical:

• the release of the prisoners


• the release of the prisoners by the government


• *the release the prisoners (ungrammatical)

So let's see if we can find a phrase which includes the person or people being murdered:

• The three men were convicted of conspiracy to murder people unknown.

Here we can see that the verb murder has a Direct Object, the noun phrase people unknown. Let's just check to see if maybe we could also use the noun murder here instead:

• *The three men were convicted of conspiracy to murder of people unknown. (ungrammatical)

No, this result is very bad indeed. The word murder is definitely a verb here. This also means that the word to is part of an infinitival construction. It is not the preposition to which we see in go to the beach.

For most native speakers conspiracy to a murder would not be grammatical. However the noun conspiracy can take other infinitival clauses as Complements:

• conspiracy to commit robbery


• conspiracy to steal


• conspiracy to injure