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.
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Drag has long been identified as the main reason for the loss of energy in fluid transmission like pipelines and other similar transportation channels. The main contributor to this drag is the viscosity as well as friction against the pipe walls, which will results in more pumping power consumption.
The aim in this study was first to understand the role of additives in the viscosity reduction and secondly to evaluate the drag reduction efficiency when blending with different solvents.
This research investigated flow increase (%FI) in heavy oil at different flow rates (2 to 10 m3/hr) in two pipes (0.0381 m & 0.0508 m) ID By using different additives (toluene and naphtha) with different concent
... Show MoreThe present study aimed to identify teaching problems which facing the teachers for first three grades classes, and if these problems different according to some variables teacher qualification, experience period, class grade). The study sample consist of (137 )
female teachers who teach the first three grades in Braimy city in Oman, teachers spread in five government schools. Both researchers developed questionnaire to measure problems faced by the mentioned teachers, consist of 50 questions distributed into 4 dimensions (teacher, students, the curriculum, the evaluations), Also researchers checked questionnaire validity and stability. The results indicate to: The most common probl
... Show MoreThe organization and coordination of any communication is based on the system of turn-taking which refers to the process by which a participant in a conversation takes the role of speaker. The progression of any conversation is achieved by the change of roles between speaker and hearer which, in its turn, represents the heart of the turn-taking system. The turn-taking system is not a random process but it is a highly organized process governed by a set of rules. Thus, this system has certain features and rules which exist in any English communicative process. These rules, if applied by speakers, help to achieve successful exchange of turns in any conversation. This paper attempts to present full exposition of the concepts of conversation
... Show MoreExperimental investigations have been carried out to investigate the pH-control problems of industrial electroplating wastewater treatment plants. The accurate and sensitive PID control system could treat most problem and disturbances in the normal operation of the water treatment. However, conventional treatment was replaced by proprietary treatment agent called a QUASIL which was found to be more effective for a wide range of pH.
Objective: Assessment the psychological problems in patients with colorectal cancer, and to find out the
relationship between socio-demographic characteristics such as (age, sex, marital status, educational level,
and occupation) and psychological problems for those patients.
Methodology: A descriptive design is employed through the present study from 1
st July 2011 to 25
th December
2011 in order to study the quality of life in colorectal cancer patients with psychological problems.
A purposive (non probability) sample is selected for the study which includes (60) patients diagnosed with
colorectal cancer were treated in Mosul Oncology and Nuclear Medicine hospital or the patients who visited
the outpatient cl
The study aims to identify the relationship between Dogmatism and the behavioral problems among preparatory school students. To do this, the researcher adopted Rokeach’s scale of dogmatism, which was modified to be more appropriate of the Iraqi context. A sample of (300) students was chosen randomly to collect the needed data for the current study. To process the data, the researcher employed T-test, Pearson correlation coefficient, and Weighted Mean. The finding revealed that the study sample experience too many behavioral problems, as well as there is a positive strong relationship between Dogmatism and behavioral problems. To conclude, the researcher recommended holding counseling sessions targeting school students to mitigate
... Show MoreText categorization refers to the process of grouping text or documents into classes or categories according to their content. Text categorization process consists of three phases which are: preprocessing, feature extraction and classification. In comparison to the English language, just few studies have been done to categorize and classify the Arabic language. For a variety of applications, such as text classification and clustering, Arabic text representation is a difficult task because Arabic language is noted for its richness, diversity, and complicated morphology. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis and a comparison for researchers in the last five years based on the dataset, year, algorithms and the accuracy th
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