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 work studies the role of serum apelin-36 and Glutathione S-transferases (GST) activity in association with the hormonal, metabolic profiles and their link to the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in healthy and patients' ladies with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). A total of fifty-four (PCOS) patients and thirty-one healthy woman as a control have been studied. The PCOS patients were subdivided on the basis of body-mass-index (BMI), into 2-subgroups (the first group was obese-PCOS with BMI ≥ 30 and the second group was non-obese PCOS MBI<30). Fasting-insulin-levels and Lipid-profile, Homeostatic-model assessment-of-insulin-resistance (HOMA-IR), follicle-stimulating-hormone (FSH), luteinizing-hormone (LH), testosterone and
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HR Al-Hamamy, AA Noaimi, IA Al-Turfy, AI Rajab, Journal of Cosmetics, Dermatological Sciences and Applications, 2015
BACKGROUND: Hospital training courses for pharmacy students were required to prepare students to meet the challenges of real-world hospital work. AIM: Because there have been few studies on the efficacy of such courses, we aimed to recognize recent graduates’ perceptions, benefits, and factors influencing the quality of hospital training courses for pharmacy students. METHODS: A qualitative study using a phenomenology approach was conducted in 2022 and included several hospitals in Baghdad, Iraq, using in-depth face-to-face individual-based semi-structured interviews. Until saturation, a convenient sample of recently graduated pharmacists was included. The obtained data were analyzed using a thematic content analysis approach
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The analysis of detective novels has taken different aspects. The linguistic analysis of them, for example, has tackled the linguistic systems of morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. In line with the linguistic analysis, this study explores the various pragmatic and stylistic devices realized through detective novels for the purpose of misdirecting and deceiving the reader. The problem is that when readers try to reach to the truth, they face difficulties. They might not reach to the right solution or infer wrong conclusions because writers use some techniques to hide the truth and mislead them. This study aims at examining these techniques and devices; namely, Grice's Maxims and ambiguity as pragmatic devices on the
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In this paper, a mathematical model is proposed and studied to describe the spread of shigellosis disease in the population community. We consider it divided into four classes namely: the 1st class consists of unaware susceptible individuals, 2nd class of infected individuals, 3rd class of aware susceptible individuals and 4th class are people carrying bacteria. The solution existence, uniqueness as well as bounded-ness are discussed for the shigellosis model proposed. Also, the stability analysis has been conducted for all possible equilibrium points. Finally the proposed model is studied numerically to prove the analytic results and discussing the effects of the external sources for dis
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Long memory analysis is one of the most active areas in econometrics and time series where various methods have been introduced to identify and estimate the long memory parameter in partially integrated time series. One of the most common models used to represent time series that have a long memory is the ARFIMA (Auto Regressive Fractional Integration Moving Average Model) which diffs are a fractional number called the fractional parameter. To analyze and determine the ARFIMA model, the fractal parameter must be estimated. There are many methods for fractional parameter estimation. In this research, the estimation methods were divided into indirect methods, where the Hurst parameter is estimated fir
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Identity is an influential and flexible concept in social sciences and political studies. The basic sense of identity is looking for uniqueness. In one sense, it is a sign of identification with those we assume they are similar to us or at least in some significant ways they are so. Globalization, migration, modern technologies, media and political conflicts are argued to have a crucial effect on identity representation in terms of the political perspectives specifically in the United States of America. This paper endeavors to investigate how American politicians represent their identities in speeches delivered in different periods of time namely from 2015 to 2018 in terms of the pragmatic paradigm. Three randomly selected speeches by fa
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DBN Rashid, International Journal of Innovation, Creativity and Change, 2020
Pragmatics looked at literary discourse as an external subject that needed an actor and based on a communicative relationship, that is, it examines literary work by focusing on the author's intent, and attempting to monitor the pilgrim and logical dimension in the text. It focuses on the practical and communicative aspect of the language, which aims to convince the recipient and his or her emotional influence.And the novel (Yamrim) starting from the title (Sos) communication, and building dialogue and pilgrims based on two different logic completely, the logic of optimism and look at things with absolute objectivity, the logic of pessimism and closure and look at things with absolute passion. These two tendencies are embodied by the char
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