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.
An investigation of the quadrupole deformation of Kr, Sr, Zr, and Mo isotopes has been conducted using the HFB method and SLy4 Skyrme parameterization. The primary role of occupancy of single particle state 2d5/2 in the existence of the weakly bound structure around N=50 is probed. Shell gaps are performed using a few other calculations for the doubly magic number 100Sn using different Skyrme parameterizations. We explore the interplays among neutron pairing strength and neutron density profile in two dimensions, along with the deformations of 100Sn.
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During recent years, there has been an increasing interest in the investigation of the cytokines roles in pathogenesis of cancer, thus the study aimed at evaluating the level of tumor necrosis factor-alpha(TNF-?) in sera of Iraqi multiple myeloma (MM) patients. Beta 2-microglobulion (?2-m) was assessed to determine if there was any association between this cytokine and the level of ?2- m, as the latter is related to the stage of the disease. In addition, the age and gender were also taken into consideration. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between IgG and TNF-? in sera of patients. 49 Iraqi patients (27 males and 22 females).The patients were also divided into two groups: the first group included (17) patients who were
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In this study, a traumatic spinal cord injury (TSCI) classification system is proposed using a convolutional neural network (CNN) technique with automatically learned features from electromyography (EMG) signals for a non-human primate (NHP) model. A comparison between the proposed classification system and a classical classification method (k-nearest neighbors, kNN) is also presented. Developing such an NHP model with a suitable assessment tool (i.e., classifier) is a crucial step in detecting the effect of TSCI using EMG, which is expected to be essential in the evaluation of the efficacy of new TSCI treatments. Intramuscular EMG data were collected from an agonist/antagonist tail muscle pair for the pre- and post-spinal cord lesi
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Police play an important role in any society. Where they maintain public order by stopping and deterring crime and bringing criminals to justice. In order to achieve these objectives, they have certain means of law (search, arrest, use of force that may be lethal in some cases). However, such means may be misused in a way that harms members of society such as (Exceeding the Scope of a search warrant, violation of privacy of individuals, False Imprisonment, Excessive use of force, Sudden Deaths in custody, Sexual Assault and Harassment, Failure to respond for Domestic violence calls), which raises the civil liability of police officers and their agencies for such damage. Police officers may even abuse their characteristics even outside offic
... Show MoreWe used to think of grammar as the bones of the language and vocabulary as the flesh to be added given that language consisted largely of life generated chunks of lexis. This “skeleton image” has been proverbially used to refer to that central feature of lexis named collocation- an idea that for the first 15 years of language study and analysis gave a moment‟s thought to English classroom material and methodology.
The work of John Sinclair, Dave Willis, Ron Carter, Michael McCarthy, Michael Lewis, and many others have all contributed to the way teachers today approach the area of lexis and what it means in the teaching/learning process of the language. This also seems to have incorporated lexical ideas into the teaching mechanis
In this paper, various aspects of smart grids are described. These aspects include the components of smart grids, the detailed functions of the smart energy meters within the smart grids and their effects on increasing the awareness, the advantages and disadvantages of smart grids, and the requirements of utilizing smart grids. To put some light on the difference between smart grids and traditional utility grids, some aspects of the traditional utility grids are covered in this paper as well.