METAPHORICAL MEANING OF PHRASAL VERBS

[kiskrof]

I find phrasal verbs in English fascinating. Some people tend to think they are arbitrary while other people exaggerate their cognitive coherence. I think the truth in between, the system being the result of a long history of metaphors and of metaphors of metaphors and so on. To take an example that is not an phrasal verb, the original meaning of LEGERE in Latin is "pick up", leading to "pick the letters up from the page", i.e. read, leading to LECTURE, i.e. "tell people what to do". My guess is that many phrasal verbs are second, third or fourth degree metaphors that can only be explained through historical analysis. I would be thankful if someone knew about some examples. I am curious too to understand the meaning of UP in GIVE UP, especially since UP usually means the exact opposite, like in STAND UP FOR YOUR RIGHT or PUT UP A FIGHT. What is the meaning of UP in MAKE UP FOR MY LACK OF PHYSICAL STRENGTH?

[Daniel]

Welcome to the forum.

This may not be limited to phrasal verbs specifically, but instead found more generally with directional expressions associated with verbs, realized in different languages as adverbs or particles or suffixes, etc.

A very widespread and well-known example is that, via embodiment (the human condition of perceiving life from a human body), "up" is considered good (standing up straight, being strong), and "down" is bad (lying down, being weak or dead, etc.). So you find a lot of metaphorical extensions along those lines, in different domains.

Another example is that in some languages directionals are extended to give various nuances to verbal meanings. One example is Hausa (and some other languages) where directional suffixes (literally meaning "toward (speaker)" and "away (from speaker)") can express a contrast between "buy" and "sell" for example.

There are also some more typical patterns such as spatial prepositions (or phrasal verbs) taking on a temporal meaning, such as "in front of" meaning physical location extended to refer to something in the future.

In short, yes, you are right about your observation, and it's probably part of a very general pattern in languages. The examples you've given are a bit more subtle than some types I mentioned above (e.g. spatial>temporal), but you can try to explain them by looking into the idea of conceptual metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. In general, the idea is that some components of the meaning of a word are preserved (e.g. up = more), while others are lost (e.g. up = vertical location), when the word is extended to a new domain. The new meaning is still partially tied to the old, but it's used in a new way.

The patterns you observed are basically from concrete (spatial) meanings to more abstract (e.g. emotional, economic, etc.) meanings, and it makes sense that we usually start with concrete words and then extend those to express more abstract meanings.

General topics to read about:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammaticalization