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 importance of the research comes from dealing with the problem of lack of traffic awareness, which causes accidents and the occurrence of human and material losses, and the research aims to study the role of satellite channels in forming traffic awareness among the public, and a sample was chosen from Baghdad consisting of (280) individuals, male and female, and used the questionnaire tool. To obtain the data, which included several questions, the results were analyzed statistically and several results were reached, the most important of which is that there is an interest among the public in following traffic programs at a rate of one to two hours to receive information through traffic programs and to identify and apply gener
... Show MoreAt the beginning of the twentieth century distorting handling totalitarian phenomena of art, which can be called the stage of the test, transition from the theory of ideal theory and other realistic is not cushy, since it requires vision and reading and other concepts, and in light of this dialectic manifested research problem by asking the following Is affected by the design idealism and realism. Through the above mentioned questions, the researcher found rationale for addressing this problem, the study through his research, which is marked (idealism and realism in a comparative study design). And demonstrated the importance of research in the identification of the concept and the effectiveness of the two theories idealism and realism a
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Objective: preparing educational units for the magnet poles strategy in learning the spiking skill in volleyball, and identifying the effect of the magnet poles strategy in learning the spiking skill in volleyball for female students.Research methodology: The experimental design with two equal experimental and control groups with tight control was also adopted in the pre- and post-tests. The boundaries of this research community are represented by fourth-grade middle school students at Basra Girls' Middle School (2024-2025), whose total number is (90) students, distributed by nature into 4 sections. Sections (A-B) were determined by lottery, so that Section (A) represents the experimental group and Section (B) represents the control
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MH Hamzah, AF Abbas, International Journal of Early Childhood Special Education, 2022
The irony pushes us to inquire about what is in the text of contradiction, irony, suspense, and other acts of paradox, as well as a departure from what is logical, or familiar, that attracts the attention of the addressee, and this is what drives us to introspect the text and interrogate it in order to get to know the intended product of the text or its real or metaphorical intent. On the other hand, the irony is more in the literary text than in the scientific texts. Therefore, critics add the word literature to it in their definition.
As it is represented by the paradox, we will seek to study the paradox of the title and the problematic that it may pose as the beginning of the text, and i
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Ferrite with general formula Ni1-x Cox Fe2O4(where x=0.0.1,0.3,0.5,0.7, and 0.9), were prepared by standard ceramic technique. The main cubic spinel structure phase for all samples was confirmed by x-ray diffraction patterns. The lattice parameter results were (8.256-8.299 °A). Generally, x -ray density increased with the addition of Cobalt and showed value between (5.452-5.538gm/cm3). Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) showed that the average grain size and surface roughness was decreasing with the increasing cobalt concentration. Scanning Electron Microscopy images show that grains had an irregular distribution and irregular shape. The A.C conductivity was found to increase with the frequency and the addition of Cobal
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This work consists of a numerical simulation to predict the velocity and temperature distributions, and an experimental work to visualize the air flow in a room model. The numerical work is based on non-isothermal, incompressible, three dimensional, k turbulence model, and solved using a computational fluid dynamic (CFD) approach, involving finite volume technique to solve continuity, momentum and energy equations, that governs the room’s turbulent flow domain. The experimental study was performed using (1/5) scaled room model of the actual dimensions of the room to simulate room air flow and visualize the flow pattern using smoke generated from burnt herbs and collected in a smoke generator to delivered through
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The Arabic pronouns received a lot of attention from the ancient Arab grammarians, so they explained their origins, the different forms of their structure, and the aspects of the Arabs’ use of them, and explained the aspects and reasons for these uses, with what they had of linguistic insight, which guided them to clarify the truth of these pronouns.
And recently, this research seeks new knowledge of the development of the structure of the nominative pronouns (he), (she), (them), (taa), and (waw) between dialects and towards classical Arabic, by analyzing the structure of these pronouns into their components. Its linguistic formulas are traced from the ancient Arabic texts, and by ancient I mean the texts of the era of linguistic ci
The study was conducted to assess the attitude and awareness of a sample of people regarding the indiscriminate slaughter and its effects on health and the environment compared with slaughtering in a slaughterhouse. The sample consisted of 120 persons from six equal professional groups contacted with the butchery labour (livestock keeper, truck driver, butcher, veterinarian, shopkeeper and consumer). The age ranged 22-76 years old, mean 52±10 years, lived ≥ 5 years in the Baghdad city. The results showed that there is a preference for slaughtering inside the slaughterhouse due to the presence of veterinary examination, slaughtering and preparing meat in a healthy, easy-to-clean places, unlike the indiscriminate sla
... Show MoreThis study aimed to assess orthodontic postgraduate students’ use of social media during the COVID-19 lockdown. Ninety-four postgraduate students (67 master’s students and 27 doctoral students) were enrolled in the study and asked to fill in an online questionnaire by answering questions regarding their use of social media during the COVID-19 lockdown. The frequency distributions and percentages were calculated using SPSS software. The results showed that 99% of the students used social media. The most frequently used type of social media was Facebook, 94%, followed by YouTube, 78%, and Instagram, 65%, while Twitter and Linkedin were used less, and no one used Blogger. About 63% of the students used elements of social media to l
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