Phrasal verbs with “act”

Phrasal verb	Meaning	Example
Act on	To take action because of something like information received	The police were ACTING ON a tip from an informer and caught the gang red-handed.
Act on	Affect	The medicine only ACTS ON infected tissue.
Act out	Perform something with actions and gestures.	They ACTED OUT the story on stage.
Act out	Express an emotion in your behaviour	Their anger is ACTED OUT in their antisocial behaviour.
Act up	Behave badly or strangely	My computer’s ACTING UP; I think I might have a virus.
Act upon	To take action because of something like information received	The police were ACTING UPON a tip-off.
Act upon	Affect	The enzyme ACTS UPON certain proteins.

 

Heard of phrasal verbs before?

A phrasal verb is a combination of a verb and a single-word or multi-word prepositional phrase (alt. preposition, adverb, particle) that form a complete (i.e. combined) semantic unit as a phrase.

A phrasal verb may also be called ‘compound verb’, ‘verb-adverb combination’, ‘verb-particle construction’(VPC).

As a class, phrasal verb complexes belong to the same category as the so-called separable verbs of other Germanic languages. They are more commonly found in everyday, informal speech as opposed to more formal English and Latinate verbs, such as “to get together” rather than “to congregate”, “to put off” rather than “to postpone” (or “to deter”), or “to do up” rather than “to fasten”.

In general it can be shown that to use and understand the “phrasal verb complex”, even in the case of idioms, it is necessary to understand both the verb and the particle independently and how these work together to give a combined meaning. 

We will be seeing a lot of phrasal verbs and their usage in my upcoming posts …