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.
Given the importance of possessing the digital competence (DC) required by the technological age, whether for teachers or students and even communities and governments, educational institutions in most countries have sought to benefit from modern technologies brought about by the technological revolution in developing learning and teaching and using modern technologies in providing educational services to learners. Since university students will have the doors to work opened in all fields, the research aims to know their level of DC in artificial intelligence (AI) applications and systems utilizing machine learning (ML) techniques. The descriptive approach was used, as the research community consisted of students from the University
... Show MoreMachine Learning (ML) algorithms are increasingly being utilized in the medical field to manage and diagnose diseases, leading to improved patient treatment and disease management. Several recent studies have found that Covid-19 patients have a higher incidence of blood clots, and understanding the pathological pathways that lead to blood clot formation (thrombogenesis) is critical. Current methods of reporting thrombogenesis-related fluid dynamic metrics for patient-specific anatomies are based on computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analysis, which can take weeks to months for a single patient. In this paper, we propose a ML-based method for rapid thrombogenesis prediction in the carotid artery of Covid-19 patients. Our proposed system aims
... Show MoreThe convolutional neural networks (CNN) are among the most utilized neural networks in various applications, including deep learning. In recent years, the continuing extension of CNN into increasingly complicated domains has made its training process more difficult. Thus, researchers adopted optimized hybrid algorithms to address this problem. In this work, a novel chaotic black hole algorithm-based approach was created for the training of CNN to optimize its performance via avoidance of entrapment in the local minima. The logistic chaotic map was used to initialize the population instead of using the uniform distribution. The proposed training algorithm was developed based on a specific benchmark problem for optical character recog
... Show MoreThe electrical properties of polycrystalline cadmium telluride thin films of different thickness (200,300,400)nm deposited by thermal evaporation onto glass substrates at room temperature and treated at different annealing temperature (373, 423, 473) K are reported. Conductivity measurements have been showed that the conductivity increases from 5.69X10-5 to 0.0011, 0.0001 (?.cm)-1 when the film thickness and annealing temperature increase respectively. This increasing in ?d.c due to increasing the carrier concentration which result from the excess free Te in these films.
The nuclear structure included the matter, proton and neutron densities of the ground state, the nuclear root-mean-square (rms) radii and elastic form factors of one neutron 23O and 24F halo nuclei have been studied by the two body model of within the harmonic oscillator (HO) and Woods-Saxon (WS) radial wave functions. The calculated results show that the two body model within the HO and WS radial wave functions succeed in reproducing neutron halo in these exotic nuclei. Moreover, the Glauber model at high energy has been used to calculated the rms radii and reaction cross section of these nuclei.
The neutron, proton, and matter densities of the ground state of the proton-rich 23Al and 27P exotic nuclei were analyzed using the binary cluster model (BCM). Two density parameterizations were used in BCM calculations namely; Gaussian (GS) and harmonic oscillator (HO) parameterizations. According to the calculated results, it found that the BCM gives a good description of the nuclear structure for above proton-rich exotic nuclei. The elastic form factors of the unstable 23Al and 27P exotic nuclei and those of their stable isotopes 27Al and 31P are studied by the plane-wave Born approximation. The main difference between the elastic form factors of unstable nuclei and the
... Show MoreVolunteerism is an element included in many human cultures. It represents a positive cooperative act between individuals and groups. It expresses the social value systems. As a social phenomenon, it develops in societies according to innumerous circumstances and conditions. This study uses a functional approach that assumes that volunteering performs six functions for volunteers. Namely, we assume that volunteering (1) creates a sense of protection (2) meets significant cultural values (3) improves professional status of volunteers, (4) strengthens their social relationships, (5) helps them achieve a better understanding of life, and finally, (6) enhances their outlook and self-esteem. The central aim of the study is to discuss these fun
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