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 main objective of this study is to experimentally investigate the effect of the CMC polymeric drag reducer on the pressure drop occurred along the annulus of the wellbore in drilling operation and investigate the optimum polymer concentration that give the minimum pressure drop. A flow loop was designed for this purpose consist from 14 m long with transparent test section and differential pressure transmitter that allows to sense and measure the pressure losses along the test section. The results from the experimental work show that increasing in polymer concentration help to reduce the pressure drop in annulus and the optimum polymer concentration with the maximum drag reducing is 0.8 kg/m3. Also increasing in flow rate a
... Show MoreThe problem of the damage caused by terrorist acts has raised many difficulties in many countries, including Iraq, which requires the existence of a law that sets out sufficient rules for compensating the victims of terrorist acts, in order to compensate them for the harm they have not suffered. It may be difficult or impossible for them to identify causing damage, and therefore unable to obtain compensation by applying the traditional rules of liability that require proof of fault and identify the culprit. The security funds come as an appropriate alternative that pays compensation in such cases for victims to reparation for the damage they suffered. Therefore, this problem remains one of the most problems that Iraq suffers from it, which
... Show MoreTendon is important structure of the human body, since it can sustain tensile loading. The primary function of this tissue is to stabilize the joints they attached to it during daily activities. As well as, tendon has viscoelastic properties that can determine their response to loading and restrict the potential of injuries. One of the major points that this paper works with is the study of the biomechanical behaviour of tendon in response to tensile loading to describe their biological behaviour. Also, conclude the mathematical expression that may illustrate the tendon behaviour. All of the experiments were made in Physiology laboratories / Medical College/ Al- Nahrain University on ten rats "Rattus Norvegicus" of [108- 360] gm weight f
... Show MoreABSTRACT Porous silicon has been produced in this work by photochemical etching process (PC). The irradiation has been achieved using ordinary light source (150250 W) power and (875 nm) wavelength. The influence of various irradiation times and HF concentration on porosity of PSi material was investigated by depending on gravimetric measurements. The I-V and C-V characteristics for CdS/PSi structure have been investigated in this work too.
Natural settings make it challenging to identify facial expressions since head position, illumination level, and occlusion vary. Thus, developing a more generic model without front-facing images alone is quite crucial. This research proposes a facial expression recognition model based on pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks with transfer learning. The model was trained on several cases to classify face expressions into seven classifications efficiently. The proposed system used the EfficientNetB0 model that has one dense dropout layer. The model first rescales and norms the input dataset in the input layer that takes images of a larger resolution to get better results. After entering 7 blocks sequential
... Show MoreThe increasing demand for continual learning in sequential data processing has led to progressively complex training methodologies and larger recurrent network architectures. Consequently, this has widened the knowledge gap between continual learning with recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and their ability to operate on devices with limited memory and compute. To address this challenge, we investigate the effectiveness of simplifying RNN architectures, particularly gated recurrent unit (GRU), and its impact on both single-task and multitask sequential learning. We propose a new variant of GRU, namely the minion recurrent unit (MiRU). MiRU replaces conventional gating mechanisms with scaling coefficients to regulate dynamic updates of hidden
... Show MoreSocial Networking has dominated the whole world by providing a platform of information dissemination. Usually people share information without knowing its truthfulness. Nowadays Social Networks are used for gaining influence in many fields like in elections, advertisements etc. It is not surprising that social media has become a weapon for manipulating sentiments by spreading disinformation. Propaganda is one of the systematic and deliberate attempts used for influencing people for the political, religious gains. In this research paper, efforts were made to classify Propagandist text from Non-Propagandist text using supervised machine learning algorithms. Data was collected from the news sources from July 2018-August 2018. After annota
... Show MoreTelevision white spaces (TVWSs) refer to the unused part of the spectrum under the very high frequency (VHF) and ultra-high frequency (UHF) bands. TVWS are frequencies under licenced primary users (PUs) that are not being used and are available for secondary users (SUs). There are several ways of implementing TVWS in communications, one of which is the use of TVWS database (TVWSDB). The primary purpose of TVWSDB is to protect PUs from interference with SUs. There are several geolocation databases available for this purpose. However, it is unclear if those databases have the prediction feature that gives TVWSDB the capability of decreasing the number of inquiries from SUs. With this in mind, the authors present a reinforcement learning-ba
... Show MoreOnline learning is not a new concept in education, but it has been used extensively since the Covid-19 pandemic and is still in use now. Every student in the world has gone through this learning process from the primary to the college levels, with both teachers and students conducting instruction online (at home). The goal of the current study is to investigate college students’ attitudes towards online learning. To accomplish the goal of the current study, a questionnaire is developed and adjusted before being administered to a sample of 155 students. Additionally, validity and reliability are attained. Some conclusions, recommendations, and suggestions are offered in the end.