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 textbook is the primary means of creativity and thinking, which has a major role in the development of the readership and mental abilities of the student. It is the basic tool in education in Iraq for the teacher and the student, which cannot be dispensed in any educational program. The current study aimed at the book of the biology of the sixth grade of science in Iraq (comparative study). It was compared to the book of biology for the twelve grade in the Kingdom of Jordan to identify the ratio of similarity and differences between them, in addition, to identify the weaknesses in the Iraq curriculum and developing appropriate solutions and suggestions to address them. The sample was represented with books of biology (six-science cla
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In recent decades, drug modification is no longer unusual in the pharmaceutical world as living things are evolving in response to environmental changes. A non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) such as aspirin is a common over-the-counter drug that can be purchased without medical prescription. Aspirin can inhibit the synthesis of prostaglandin by blocking the cyclooxygenase (COX) which contributes to its properties such as anti-inflammatory, antipyretic, antiplatelet and etc. It is also being considered as a chemopreventive agent due to its antithrombotic actions through the COX’s inhibition. However, the prolonged use of aspirin can cause heartburn, ulceration, and gastro-toxicity in children and adults. This review article hi
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Identity crisis is a dominant literary theme, especially in most Arab women writers’ works. However, it has not been given enough attention from a linguistic point of view. By so doing, the current study intends to fill this gap by analyzing the identity crisis from a pragma-stylistic perspective by examining the writer's style in three purposely selected extracts from Diana Abu-Jaber’s novel Origin (2007). The study aims to examine the identity crisis by using pragmatic and stylistic tools and to explore the effects of Abu-Jaber’s stylistic choices on the readers of her work. To conduct this study, an eclectic model comprising Searle’s speech acts (1979), Brown and Levinson's politeness theory (1987), Leech's model of figur
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The research focuses on determining the role of customer relationship management in improving financial performance by surveying the opinions of a number of employees of a number of Iraqi private banks. The customer has become the focus of attention and the most important factors of success and profitability and competition. Therefore, decisions related to the customer are important decisions that support the process of making, And follow-up of administrative decisions, including financial decisions aimed at improving the financial performance of banks and distinguish them from competitors. Thus, the techniques used in customer relations management programs to collect, analyze and use data and information have beco
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Objective(s): To evaluate primary health care services at primary health care centers in Baghdad City and to compare between these primary health care centers relative to such quality. Methodology: A descriptive design, using the evaluation approach, is study to Evaluation of quality of primary care services at primary health care centers in Baghdad City. A multistage probability sample of (36) health care centers was selected. The sample consists of (12) model centers, (12) urban centers, and (12) rural centers.A constructedquestionnaire is composed of (23) items. It consisted of (5) parts that include inta
This study was conducted to provide a detailed description of the osteology features of Alburnus amirkabiri from the Qareh Chai river, markazi province, Iran. For this purpose, eight specimens of A. amirkabiri were collected from the Qareh Chai River by electrofishing and fixed in 4% buffered formalin after anesthesia. The specimens were cleared and stained for osteological examination and its detailed osteological characterizations and differences with available osteological data of other members of the genus Alburnus were provided.
Background: In young adults, multiple sclerosis is a prevalent chronic inflammatory demyelinating condition. It is characterized by white matter affection, but many individuals also have significant gray matter involvement. A double-inversion recovery pulse (DIR) pattern was recently proposed to improve the visibility of multiple sclerosis lesions. Objective: To find out how well a DIR sequence, FLAIR, and T2-weighted pulse sequences can find MS lesions in the supratentorial and infratentorial regions. Methods: A total of 37 patients with established diagnoses of multiple sclerosis were included in this cross-sectional study. Brain MRI was done using double inversion recovery, T2, and FLAIR sequences. The number of lesions was count
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A field study was conducted on a sample of the public in Baghdad to study the audience's exposure to the television promotion of pharmaceutical products and their trends in order to determine the rate of exposure of the public to the television promotion of pharmaceutical products according to the theory of uses and rumors and to determine the public's attitudes towards television promotion of pharmaceutical products. A survey of (25) a questions was distributed to a sample of the audience of 150 people. The statistical program SPSS was used to unload the data and for the calculation of frequencies and percentages and correlation coefficients. The research reached several results, Most importantly, the television promotion is well receiv
... Show MoreThe Iranian nuclear program was one of the most prominent issues in the international arena, in light of Iran's insistence on using it in various ways, and according to international changes, it came under pressure from the American side to impose packages of sanctions, which continued to our time, as it went to Russia and China to gain support in developing its nuclear activities. And, by virtue of the common interests that are linked between them, Iran has received great support from the last two countries in all fields to reach the final agreement in 2015, regarding asserting the peace of these activities, in addition to lifting all restrictions represented in the previous sanctions according to the Security Council resolutions, Aldo
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