Idioms are a very important part of the English language: you are told that if you want to go far (succeed) you should pull your socks up (make a serious effort to improve your behaviour, the quality of your work, etc.) and use your grey matter (brain).1 Learning and translating idioms have always been very difficult for foreign language learners. The present paper explores some of the reasons why English idiomatic expressions are difficult to learn and translate. It is not the aim of this paper to attempt a comprehensive survey of the vast amount of material that has appeared on idioms in Adams and Kuder (1984), Alexander (1984), Dixon (1983), Kirkpatrick (2001), Langlotz (2006), McCarthy and O'Dell (2002), and Wray (2002), among others. The paper concentrates on idioms as a learning-translation problem; it makes no claim to be comprehensive or academically rigorous. Leech (1989) defines an idiom as follows: “An idiom is a group of two or more words which we have to treat as a unit in learning a language. We cannot arrive at the meaning of the idiom just by adding together the meanings of the words inside it. E.g.John and Mary usedto be hardup (='They had very little money'.)”(P.186) To be more exact, an idiom is a sequence of words which is semantically and syntactically restricted, so that they function as a single unit. From a semantic point of view, the meanings of the individual words cannot be summed to produce the meanings of the idiomatic expression as a whole. Thus, fly off the handle, which means lose one's temper, cannot be understood in terms of the meanings of fly, off, or handle. The idiom phrase hot air, which means empty or boastful talk, is neither hot nor air; with hot air we are dealing with a set phrase where the meaning cannot be suggested on the basis of the two constituent words. The idiomatic meaning of spill the beans in So who spilt the beans (=told the secret) about her affair with David? has nothing to do with beans or with spilling in its literal sense. The foreign-language learner is left trying to figure out where and how the beans were spilt. From a syntactic viewpoint, the constituent parts of an idiom often do not permit the usual variability they display in other contexts. The point to be emphasized here is this: most idioms do not lend themselves easily to manipulation by speakers and writers; they are invariable and must be learned as wholes, but concord ofnumber, person and gender in the idiom phrase is still necessary, i.e. the verbs must be put into the correct form, and pronouns must agree with their antecedents: I don't give a hoot for her opinion! 2 • She doesn't give a hoot for my opinion! etc.)║He won, but only by the skin of his teeth2• She won, but only by the skin of her teeth• Iwon, but only by the skin ofmy teeth,I had to run for the train, and caught it by the skin of myteeth, etc.║He kept pullingmy arm, throwing me off my balance 2 • She kept pulling his arm, throwing him off his balance • We kept pullingher arm, throwingher offher balance, etc.2 The present paper is divided into five parts, as follows: Part I: An Overview; PART II: Learner’s Difficulties with Idioms; PART III: Some Pedagogical recommendations and Suggestions about Idioms; Part IV: Activities to Practice Idiomatic Expressions; Part V: Summary and Conclusion.
The Prophit had blamed the monopolies, and dispraise the monopoly, dismised it and warned the monopolies that they will face very severe pain. The Prophit had built the right foundation for the trade . He had made the chance of monopoly very few . Inspite of finding some monopolies in his time,he didn’t make price tag. The Rightly guided caliphs didn’t pricing the food-stuff. Umar b. Al-Khatab used many ways to encourage the enterance of the foods- stuff to the markets by the tradesmen of wholesale. The people were sailing directly from them . the tradesmen of wholesale were in competition, so they reduced the prices . but he forbid the monopoly and stopped against it by the scientific ways. Inspite of the suvering of the people in t
... Show MoreThe city of Baghdad have several large Meanders river the most important and distinctive meander is Jadiriyah meander. the nature and direction of creep river Tigris River in Baghdad Was to determine over the last century by matching maps of ancient and modern, note the increased inflections intensity and slowly in the first half of the last century because of the impact of repeated high discharge and get the process of erosion in the concave side and the process of sedimentation in the convex side . After the middle of the last century high discharges decrease due to the construction of dams and reservoirs and hence the lower activity of the river and stopped the river and meandering process confined within the borders of the river
... Show MoreTalking about Turkey joining the European Union does not mean a few conditions implemented by Turkey Vtostagib Europe torequest or do not respond, it is a further and much deeper than that, The issue is of historic proportions, cultural, and political develop a European identity itself to the test, and determine the future of the continent and the entire region for generations to come, and has repercussions economic, social and cultural scene to lend further complexity, some of what is important and beneficial to both parties, some of which deepens the fears of both. Here we can point out the fear of invasion of Islam to Europe, which is a real fear belong to the type of phobia disease produced by the categories of right-wing Christian a
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Study of the Mechanical and Electrical Properties of Modified Unsaturated Polyester Blends
Learning a foreign language is a highly interactive process, and a belief that communicative activities foster a great amount of linguistic production provides language practice and opportunities for negotiation of meaning during communicative exchanges. Thus, this study examines what benefits learner-centered classroom setting offers compared with that of teacher–centered classroom, and how less proficient learners accomplish their tasks and activities with scaffolded help during interaction with the help of proficient classmates and under the guidance of a skilful person, i.e., the teacher. The subjects participating in this study are 30 Iraqi 4th year college students in the Department of English, College of Arts , Univer
... Show MoreImitation learning is an effective method for training an autonomous agent to accomplish a task by imitating expert behaviors in their demonstrations. However, traditional imitation learning methods require a large number of expert demonstrations in order to learn a complex behavior. Such a disadvantage has limited the potential of imitation learning in complex tasks where the expert demonstrations are not sufficient. In order to address the problem, we propose a Generative Adversarial Network-based model which is designed to learn optimal policies using only a single demonstration. The proposed model is evaluated on two simulated tasks in comparison with other methods. The results show that our proposed model is capable of completing co
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Many undergraduate learners at English departments who study English as a foreign language are unable to speak and use language correctly in their post -graduate careers. This problem can be attributed to certain difficulties, which they faced throughout their education years that hinder their endeavors to learn. Therefore, this study aims to discover the main difficulties faced by EFL students in language learning and test the difficulty variable according to gender and college variables then find suitable solutions for enhancing learning. A questionnaire with 15 items and 5 scales were used to help in discovering the difficulties. The questionnaire was distributed to the selected sample of study wh
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Botnet detection develops a challenging problem in numerous fields such as order, cybersecurity, law, finance, healthcare, and so on. The botnet signifies the group of co-operated Internet connected devices controlled by cyber criminals for starting co-ordinated attacks and applying various malicious events. While the botnet is seamlessly dynamic with developing counter-measures projected by both network and host-based detection techniques, the convention techniques are failed to attain sufficient safety to botnet threats. Thus, machine learning approaches are established for detecting and classifying botnets for cybersecurity. This article presents a novel dragonfly algorithm with multi-class support vector machines enabled botnet
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