The expansion of modern English vocabulary on the example of phrasal verbs with the particle down

This article studies the semantic potential of phrasal verbs with the particle down as a means of expanding the modern English language. The research material is based on the data of explanatory and phraseological dictionaries of the English language. The British National Corpus (BNC) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) are used as a source of discursive analysis. The component analysis of the meanings of phrasal verbs with the particle down enables to reveal their broad semantic possibilities. The particle down when forming a unified semantic whole with the verb retains confidently the main seme ‘downward' and modifies the meaning to denote the movement of objects of the surrounding world from top to bottom. It is the spatial component down in the aspect of vertical division of space that forms the archiseme for phrasal verbs on the basis of which subsequent meta-phorization occurs, as well as the transfer from the feature ‘downward' to other components of both physical and non-physical space. As a result, twelve basic semantic components, i.e. archisemes, and sixty differential semes are identified. It should be noted that thirty five meanings of the verbs are not taken into account due to the diffuseness of semantic features. The meanings of the verbs marked as ‘old-fashioned' are not considered either. The contextual analysis is carried out on the basis of two thousand English-language text fragments from the late 20th - early 21st centuries by means of the continuous sampling method. The research shows that the indirect meanings of phrasal verbs with down exceed their direct spatial meanings in terms of their representation in the texts: 1297 and 703, respectively. The statistical data allow establishing the heterogeneity of the distribution of meanings. The archisemes ‘downward movement', ‘social relations' and ‘completion' are quite frequent in the texts, which is primarily due to a wide range of semes forming them. The analysis of the discursive material also shows that the semantic properties of phrasal verbs with down can expand due to the static factor of space influencing the sensory perception of the world picture. The study makes it possible to reveal the archiseme ‘feelings', which is not fixed in explanatory and phraseological dictionaries. The empirical research helps determine a progressive expansion of the vocabulary due to the particle down. Thus, phrasal verbs with down have a fairly wide range of metaphorically reinterpreted meanings, which allows us to conclude that these verbs possess a high potential of semantic possibilities and, as a consequence, can influence directly on the expanding of the vocabulary of modern English.

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