Give Paul a beating with a hearty growl! (6)
I believe the answer is:
larrup
'give' is the definition.
The answer and definition can be both to do with contact as well as being verbs in their base form.
Perhaps you can see an association between them that I don't see?
'paul a beating with a hearty growl' is the wordplay.
'a beating' indicates an anagram.
'with' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'a hearty growl' becomes 'rr' (I can't justify this - if you can you should give a lot more credence to this answer).
'paul' anagrammed gives 'laup'.
'laup' going around 'rr' is 'LARRUP'.
Can you help me to learn more?
(Other definitions for larrup that I've seen before include "Hit hard" , "Flog" .)