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 food web is a crucial conceptual tool for understanding the dynamics of energy transfer in an ecosystem, as well as the feeding relationships among species within a community. It also reveals species interactions and community structure. As a result, an ecological food web system with two predators competing for prey while experiencing fear was developed and studied. The properties of the solution of the system were determined, and all potential equilibrium points were identified. The dynamic behavior in their immediate surroundings was examined both locally and globally. The system’s persistence demands were calculated, and all conceivable forms of local bifurcations were investigated. With the aid of MATLAB, a numerical simu
... Show MoreThe current research is concerned with a pragmatic study of attack and defense acts that are used by President Donald Trump in the American Presidential Debate in 2020. Attack is an attempt to harm or defeat someone, and it is a bold message that the speaker or attacker does not like or disagree with the other antagonist. On the contrary, defense means a person responds to an attack of his or her opponent. After an attack, the politician either negates or fact-checks claims made by his opponents or tries to set the record straight. By the end of the study, it is expected to answer the following questions: What are the most frequent strategies of attack and defense that utilized by President Trump to formulate his speech? What are the reason
... Show MoreObesity among girls can cause physical, psychological, or social problems. Different cultures have different lifestyle and dietary habits which affect people’s experience about obesity. This study aimed to assess girls’ experience toward obesity.
In 2023, a qualitative conventional content analysis method was used in this study to meet the study’s objective in Baghdad and Babylon, Iraq. A probability purposive sampling method was used to gather the sample from three high schools in t
The efforts in designing and developing lightweight cryptography (LWC) started a decade ago. Many scholarly studies in literature report the enhancement of conventional cryptographic algorithms and the development of new algorithms. This significant number of studies resulted in the rise of many review studies on LWC in IoT. Due to the vast number of review studies on LWC in IoT, it is not known what the studies cover and how extensive the review studies are. Therefore, this article aimed to bridge the gap in the review studies by conducting a systematic scoping study. It analyzed the existing review articles on LWC in IoT to discover the extensiveness of the reviews and the topics covered. The results of the study suggested that many re
... Show MoreFour different spectrophotometric methods are used in this study for the determination of Sulfamethoxazole and sulfanilamide drugs in pharmaceutical compounds, synthetic samples, and in their pure forms. The work comprises four chapters which are shown in the following: Chapter One: Includes a brief for Ultraviolet-Visible (UV-VIS) Absorption spectroscopy, antibacterial drugs and sulfonamides with some methods for their determination. The chapter lists two methods for optimization; univariate method and multivariate method. The later includes different types, two of these were mentioned; simplex method and design of experiment method. Chapter Two: Includes reaction of the two studied drugs with sodium nitrite and hydrochloric acid for diazo
... Show MoreThe ultimate goal of any sale contract is to maximize the combined returns of the parties, knowing that these returns are not realized (in long-term contracts) except in the final stages of the contract. Therefore, this requires the parties to the contract to leave some elements open, including the price, because the adoption of a fixed price and inflexible will not be appropriate to meet their desires when contracting, especially with ignorance of matters beyond their will and may affect the market conditions, and the possibility of modifying the fixed price through The elimination is very limited, especially when the parties to the contract are equally in terms of economic strength. Hence, in order to respond to market uncertainties, the
... Show MoreMaximizing the net present value (NPV) of oil field development is heavily dependent on optimizing well placement. The traditional approach entails the use of expert intuition to design well configurations and locations, followed by economic analysis and reservoir simulation to determine the most effective plan. However, this approach often proves inadequate due to the complexity and nonlinearity of reservoirs. In recent years, computational techniques have been developed to optimize well placement by defining decision variables (such as well coordinates), objective functions (such as NPV or cumulative oil production), and constraints. This paper presents a study on the use of genetic algorithms for well placement optimization, a ty
... Show More500 samples of diarrhea stool were collected from different ages(less than 1year –upto30years) and for both genders from some patients in (Alwiya hospital for children, Al-kendi, central health public laboratory and some gavernarated labs) period(1/11/2009—1/10/2010). Kinds of bacteria and parasites agents were isolated and identified from patients with diarrhea. Nine species of gram negative bacteria from enterobacteriaceae were isolated, E. coli isolated are the higher ratio 4.8% of all, then Salmonella typhi4.6% while the lowest ratios is Citrobacterfreundii 0.4%, while the other identified species were be among the previous rotios. also Plesomonasshigelloides was isolated which concedride one of the bacterial local studies.many met
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