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.
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.
Various visual media are becoming an increasingly important and active instrument of communication. This fact has led some political parties and leading personalities in Iraq to make use of them as an accepted forum for the discussion of public affairs usually in a manner that conforms to their declared policy. They have to draw as much popular support as they could for the causes which they fight for. As a result, a state of great confusion has been created from the contradictory statements made by the contending parties and gave left grave consequences on all types of the audience receiving them. The problem of the study can be summarized in one major question: What is the opinions of the audience as regards the statements made by the
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Аннотация
в статье рассматриваются проблемы преподавания русской литературы в иракской аудитории.. Использование литературы в преподавании иностранного языка, как правило, имеет две цели. Первая-чисто лингвистическая .. Вторая цель, однако, ассоциируется больше с экстралингвистикой и представляет собой ознакомление студентов с различными аспектами русской жизни, культуры,
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Samples of the ovary and uterus of local breed cats used to investigate the histological, histometrical and hormonal features. The paraffin embedding technique was used for processing of tissue that stained by hematoxyline and eosin stain, and massons trichrom stain. Ovary of at proestrus or oestrus phases composed of outer cortex that covered by cuboidal germinal epithelium and inner medulla. Tunica albuginea composed of a thin layer of characterized by fusiform stromal cells. The cortex content groups of Oogonial cells, numerous primordial follicles, little primary, secondary and tertiary follicles in addition for 1-2 follicular cysts and mature corpus letium. In pregnant cat the thickness of ovarian cortex was significantly incre
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The aim of this research is to develop qualitative workouts based on certain sensory perceptions for the development of offensive basketball abilities and to determine their impact on female pupils. Several findings, based on the au-thor's extensive expertise instructing basketball materials and our closeness to the sample, revealed deficits in some sensory perceptions “in the game of basketball”, which impair the accuracy of passing the ball to the best team-mate. It also affects the pace of dribbling and the difficulty of selecting the op-timal moment and distance to fire. Therefore, the researcher designs qualita-tive activities based on many sensory experiences, including distance, speed, force, and direction shift. In addition, the
... Show More— To identify the effect of deep learning strategy on mathematics achievement and practical intelligence among secondary school students during the 2022/2023 academic year. In the research, the experimental research method with two groups (experimental and control) with a post-test were adopted. The research community is represented by the female students of the fifth scientific grade from the first Karkh Education Directorate. (61) female students were intentionally chosen, and they were divided into two groups: an experimental group (30) students who were taught according to the proposed strategy, and a control group (31) students who were taught according to the usual method. For the purpose of collecting data for the experimen
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