English phrasal verbs with the meaning "aggressive action": classification approach

The article describes a fragment of the lexical system in English that reflects the social notion of an aggressive action as a manifestation of aggressive behavior. The object of the research is phrasal verbs, in particular, frequent but least studied means of denoting an aggressive action. The factual material was taken from English-English and English-Russian explanatory dictionaries that contain the most typical contexts of the phrasal verbs usage. With the help of definition and contextual analyses the authors put forward a phrasal verb classification with the meaning ‘aggressive action'. Differentiating semantic components in the meanings of the verbs (attack, hit, use a tool of aggressive action, destroy, hurt, kill, murder, force) help organize 6 lexico-semantic groups of phrasal verbs with the meaning ‘aggressive action'. The authors show that some verbs can fall into several lexico-semantic groups as they are noted to be realizing different lexico-semantic variants of the word meanings. It is pointed out that verbs of all lexico-semantic groups implicitly or explicitly contain the component ‘tool of aggressive action'. Taking into account the heterogeneity of verb semantics and different semantic components, the authors distinguish some subgroups in each lexico-semantic group that reflect language specification of how people view the aggressive action.