Euphemisms are advantageous in people’s social life by turning sensitive into a more acceptable ones so that resentful feelings and embarrassment can be avoided. This study investigates the ability of Iraqi English learners in using euphemistic expressions, meanwhile, raising their awareness and the faculty members in English teaching faculties regarding the relevance of discussing the topics that demand euphemisation. This study comprised three stages: initial test, explicit instruction with activities, and a final test for the students’ development in this domain. A test has been distributed among 50 respondents, who are at the fourth year of their undergraduate study at the University of Babylon/ College of Basic Education. The lo
... Show MoreLexicography, the art and craft of dictionary-making, is as old as writing. Since its very early stages several thousands of years ago, it has helped to serve basically the every-day needs of written communication among individuals in communities speaking different languages or different varieties of the same language. Two general approaches are distinguished in the craft of dictionary-making: the semasiological and the onomasiological. The former is represented by usually-alphabetical dictionaries as such, i.e. their being inventories of the lexicon, while the latter is manifested in thesauruses. English and Arabic have made use of both approaches in the preparation of their dictionaries, each having a distinct aim ahead. Wit
... Show MoreThe paper is concerned with a linguistic analysis of the blurbs, used in advertising English and Arabic novels. A blurb is an advertising persuasive text, written on the back cover of a book. Blurbs of selected novels are chosen as representative examples. The selected blurbs belong to two languages, Arabic and English. The paper aims at studying the linguistic features that are characteristic of blurbs as advertising texts and making a sort of comparison between English blurbs and Arabic ones. A linguistic analysis on four levels is presented. Blurbs are tackled from the point of view of four linguistic disciplines that are phonology, syntax, semantics and discourse analysis. A reference is made to the linguistic featu
... Show MoreDBN Rashid, Rimak International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020
This paper studies the demonstratives as deictic expressions in Standard Arabic and English by outlining their phonological, syntactic and semantic properties in the two languages. On the basis of the outcome of this outline, a contrastive study of the linguistic properties of this group of deictic expressions in the two languages is conducted next. The aim is to find out what generalizations could be made from the results of this contrastive study.
The present study examines the main points of differences in the subject of greetings between the English language and the Arabic language. From the review of the related literature on greetings in both languages, it is found that Arabic greeting formulas are more elaborate than the English greetings, because of the differences in the social customs and the Arabic traditions and the Arabic culture. It is also found that Arabic greetings carry a religious meaning basing on the Islamic principle of “the same or more so”, which might lead to untranslatable loopholes when rendered in English.
This paper investigates the collocational use of irreversible food binomials in the lexicons of English (UK) and Arabic (Iraq), their word-order motivations, cultural background, and how they compare. Data consisted in sixteen pairs in English, versus fifteen in Arabic. Data analysis has shown their word order is largely motivated by logical sequencing of precedence; the semantically bigger or better item comes first and the phonologically longer word goes last. These apply in a cline of decreasing functionality: logical form first, semantic importance second, phonological form last. In competition, the member higher in this cline wins first membership. While the entries in each list clearly reflect culturally preferred food meals in the UK
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