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 structural, optical and electrical properties of ZnS films prepared by vacuum evaporation technique on glass substrate at room temperature and treated at different annealing temperatures (323, 373, 423)K of thickness (0.5)µm have been studied. The structure of these films is determined by X-ray diffraction (XRD). The X-ray diffraction studies show that the structure is polycrystalline with cubic structure, and there are strong peaks at the direction (111). The optical properties investigated which include the absorbance and transmittance spectra, energy band gab, absorption coefficient, and other optical constants. The results showed that films have direct optical transition. The optical band gab was found to be in the range t
... Show MorePoverty is defined as a low standard of living in the sense that a poor person can not afford a minimum standard of living. The phenomenon of poverty is one of the most serious problems that must be dealt with seriously. This phenomenon has persisted in Iraq for decades because of the harsh economic conditions and unstable security conditions due to the crises it has faced since 2013. This study requires much study and analysis. And rural areas as a special case. In this study, the researcher examined the poverty line as a criterion in estimating the poverty indicators, which include (poverty percentage H, poverty gap PG, poverty intensity PS), based on the continuous social and economic survey data for households in 2014. The ma
... Show MoreThe harmonic oscillator (HO) and Gaussian (GS) wave functions within the binary cluster model (BCM) have been employ to investigate the ground state neutron, proton and matter densities as well as the elastic form factors of two- neutron 6He and 16C halo nuclei. The long tail is a property that is clearly revealed in the density of the neutrons since it is found in halo orbits. The existence of a long tail in the neutron density distributions of 6He and 16C indicating that these nuclei have a neutron halo structure. Moreover, the matter rms radii and the reaction cross section (𝜎𝑅 ) of these nuclei have been calculated using the Glauber model.
The problem of the study and its significance:
Due to the increasing pressures of life continually, and constant quest behind materialism necessary and frustrations that confront us daily in general, the greater the emergence of a number of cases of disease organic roots psychological causing them because of severity of a lack of response to conventional treatments (drugs), and this is creating in patients a number of emotional disorders resulting from concern the risk of disease
That is interested psychologists and doctors searchin
... Show MoreIn this research work an attempt has been made to investigate about the Robustness of the Bayesian Information criterion to estimate the order of the autoregressive process when the error of this model, Submits to a specific distributions and different cases of the time series on various size of samples by using the simulation, This criterion has been studied by depending on ten distributions, they are (Normal, log-Normal, continues uniform, Gamma , Exponential, Gamble, Cauchy, Poisson, Binomial, Discrete uniform) distributions, and then it has been reached to many collection and recommendations related to this object , when the series residual variable is subject to each ( Poisson , Binomial , Exponential , Dis
... Show MoreThe objective of this study is to attempt to provide a quantitative analysis to the causes of unemployment in Iraq and its mechanisms of generation, as well as a review of the most important types of both visible and invisible unemployment, and an attempt to measure the disguised unemployment and analyze the causes. The problem of the research lies in the fact that the Iraqi Economy has been suffered for a long time although its characterized by abundant physical and natural resources, from the existence of the phenomenon of unemployment in the previous two types. Causing a lot of economic problems, represented by the great waste of resources and
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This research aims to determine the role of the quality of higher education in achieving organizational excellence at the universities of Baghdad and Al-Nahren, was based on research on the main hypothesis is:First:- There is correlation and between the quality of higher education dimensions (continuous improvement, measurement and analysis, the culture of the organization, optimal use of resources , customer satisfaction) and organizational excellence dimensions (strategic planning, focusing on the market and the customer, information and analysis, the effectiveness of operations, processes and resources), Second:- Second, there is the impact of relationship sig
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In this study a type of polymeric composites from melting poly propylene as a basic substance with Palm fronds powder were prepared. Evaluation of polymeric composites was done by studying some of it is mechanical properties, which included:Yong modulus (E), Impact Strength (I.S), Brinell hardness (B.H) and Compression Strength (C.S). The polymeric composites were studied before and after reinforcment by comparing between them. There was an increase in resistance of Yong modulus (E), Impact Strength (I.S), Brinell hardness (B.H) and compression Strength (C.S). Also, the effect of some acids were studied such as (HCl, H2
The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of human resource diversity management practices on achieving entrepreneurship in Jordanian public universities. To achieve the aims of the study, a well-designed questionnaire was used for collecting data. The population of the study was (7433) faculty members (including different ranks such as professors, associate professors, assistant professors and lecturers) in Jordanian public universities. The study sample was selected through the use of a random sample, the questionnaire is distributed to a sample (of 400 with the percentage of 5%) selected by using a random sampling (350) copies of the questionnaire were collected, reaching about (87.5%) out of the sum total of the dist
... Show MoreChurning of employees from organizations is a serious problem. Turnover or churn of employees within an organization needs to be solved since it has negative impact on the organization. Manual detection of employee churn is quite difficult, so machine learning (ML) algorithms have been frequently used for employee churn detection as well as employee categorization according to turnover. Using Machine learning, only one study looks into the categorization of employees up to date. A novel multi-criterion decision-making approach (MCDM) coupled with DE-PARETO principle has been proposed to categorize employees. This is referred to as SNEC scheme. An AHP-TOPSIS DE-PARETO PRINCIPLE model (AHPTOPDE) has been designed that uses 2-stage MCDM s
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