Semantics and history of English phrasal verbs

This article explores a linguistic description of English phrasal verbs and offers a short look at their historical background, in order to provide the reader with a more complete understanding of the verbs. Analysis of theories of domestic and foreign scholars and comparative analyses of phrasal verbs are made in the article. For the first time the term ‘phrasal verbs’ was used by the English linguist Logan Pearsall Smith and was recorded in the Anglo-Russian dictionary of verb combinations, published in 1986 in the Soviet Union. Machonis calls these more idiomatic phrasal verbs «frozen verbs,» relegating them to the realm of the lexicon. «Compositional» verbs, on the other hand, are seen as a verb plus a particle which adds aspect to the verb, while retaining the core meaning of the original verb. Today English continues to develop these two parallel paths. Therefore, hundreds of English phrasal verbs have French, Latin or Greek synonyms, which have the same meaning, but more «scientific» sounding. Phrasal verbs have been present for much of the history of the English language; they are easily traceable back to early Middle English. Many phrasal verbs occur within semantic frames which are typically considered idiomatic. While often, certainly initially, analyzed as additional variations in the meaning of the root verb, the combination of the verb and the particle can result in a meaning drastically different from that of the root verb.

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