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 organization and coordination of any communication is based on the system of turn-taking which refers to the process by which a participant in a conversation takes the role of speaker. The progression of any conversation is achieved by the change of roles between speaker and hearer which, in its turn, represents the heart of the turn-taking system. The turn-taking system is not a random process but it is a highly organized process governed by a set of rules. Thus, this system has certain features and rules which exist in any English communicative process. These rules, if applied by speakers, help to achieve successful exchange of turns in any conversation. This paper attempts to present full exposition of the concepts of conversation
... Show MoreActive Learning And Creative Thinking
The present study is entitled “Problems of Translating Holy Qur’an Antonyms into German: An Analytical Study”. It discusses some of the problems of translating Holy Qur’an verses that contain words so opposite in meaning to another word. The main concern of the study stresses some of the errors in translating the oppositeness of certain words of Holy Qur’an from Arabic into other languages like German, a problem that can be traced back to the fact that such words may have two opposites in meaning, one is considered and the other is completely neglected.
The errors in translating al Qur’an Antonyms can be summarized for several reasons: literal translation, ignorance of the different view
... Show MoreThe present study was designed to indicate the influence of the feeding plate on the nutritional and general health problems of the isolated cleft palate infants. For this study fourteen infants were taken, their ages between one day to one week, refered from cosmetic surgery and palate center to cleft lip and palate rehabilitation center in institute of technical medical / Baghdad for feeding plate purpose . Four infants put them as normal group; all those infants were subjected during (6th) month to evaluate the body weight, feeding problem and the respiratory infection. According to tables and figures this study showed a gradual improvement in nutritional problem including (feeding problem, body weight) and health problem (such as respir
... Show MoreOriginal Research Paper Mathematics 1-Introduction : In the light of the progress and rapid development of the applications of research in applications fields, the need to rely on scientific tools and cleaner for data processing has become a prominent role in the resolution of decisions in industrial and service institutions according to the real need of these methods to make them scientific methods to solve the problem Making decisions for the purpose of making the departments succeed in performing their planning and executive tasks. Therefore, we found it necessary to know the transport model in general and to use statistical methods to reach the optimal solution with the lowest possible costs in particular. And you know The Transportatio
... Show MoreThe research aimed at designing a teaching aid for learning backswing into handstand as well as identifying its effect on learning skill performance. The researchers hypothesized statistical differences between pre and post-tests in favor of the research group. They used the experimental method on six (13 – 16) year–old Baghdad club gymnasts. The researchers used the one group design in which all players perform pretests followed by special tests on the teaching aid than are tested posttests. The researchers conclude that the teaching aid positively affected learning the skill as well as the teaching aid was very good and endured the performance of all gymnasts. The researcher recommended making simi
... Show More
This study focuses on Social Protection Net in Iraq considered as one of the phases of social sponsorship taking care of the weak category inside society after the increased poverty such as begging, unemployment and theft… etc. which was a product of striken poverty evoked by the events that Iraqi society have passed through. Accordingly, social sponsorship law number (126) 1980 was unable to solve those problems, there springs a need for building a social protection when the Social Protection Net law started working in Iraq on 1/12/2005 according to a schedule for social assistance depending on number of family members, including new social sections such as the unemployed, blind, orphans underage and other weak sections inside society
... Show MoreDiscourse markers are expressions used to connect sentences to what comes before or after and indicate a speaker's attitude to what he is saying.As linguistic items, they have important functions in discourses of various styles or registers. And being connective elements, discourse markers relate sentences, clauses and paragraphs to each other. "One of the most prominent function of discourse markers, however, is to signal the kinds of relations a speaker perceives between different parts of the discourse". (Lenk 1997: 2) Through political discourse, different types of discourse markers are used. This paper deals with the importance and functions of discourse markers and tries to shed light on the kinds of discourse markers used in polit
... Show More