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.
This study aims to explore the impact of the interaction of the university leadership and the university organizational environment on the performance level of the staff at Al-Maaqal university. This university was chosen as a field of study because it is a new university and needs studies that develops and contributes to improve its overall performance. The problem defined by the following question: to what extent does the interaction of the university leadership and the university organizational environment affect the performance level of the teaching staff at AlMaaqal University?). The method of this study adopted a major hypothesis in which there is a statistically significant effect of university leadership and university environment o
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The emergence of oil fields and subsequent changes in adjacent land use are known to affect settlements and communities. Everywhere the industry emerges, there is little understanding about the impact of oil fields on land use in the surrounding areas. The oil industry in Iraq is one of the most important industries and is almost the main industry in the Iraqi economic sector, and it is very clear that this industry is spread over large areas, and at the same time adjoins with population communities linked to it developmentally.
The rapid development and expansion of oil extraction activities in various regions has led to many challenges related to land-use planning and management. Here, the problem of research arises on th
... Show MoreThe objectives of this study revolve around identifying the extent of funding impact on the future of the printed Iraqi press, and whether it threatens their chances of survival, stating the extent of technological development on the income of the printed newspaper, and identifying the causes of the financial crisis on the newspaper. This research is classified as descriptive research, and the researcher used the survey method, and adopted the questionnaire of the views of the contactors, in five Iraqi newspapers (morning - extent - time - the way of the people - the call). The research community included (68) respondents, whereby the comprehensive inventory method was used to define the research community, and the researcher used t
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The objectives of this study revolve around identifying the extent of funding impact on the future of the printed Iraqi press, and whether it threatens their chances of survival, stating the extent of technological development on the income of the printed newspaper, and identifying the causes of the financial crisis on the newspaper.
This research is classified as descriptive research, and the researcher used the survey method, and adopted the questionnaire of the views of the contactors, in five Iraqi newspapers (morning - extent - time - the way of the people - the call).
The research community included (68) respondents, whereby the comprehensive inventory method was used to define the research community, and the researcher used
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The research aims to identify the positives formulation entrances authors depending on the setting retaining the names of the authors of Arab veterans and cons of setting the entrances to Arab authors ancient depending on the nickname by desktop diligence without reference to a setting retaining the potential to benefit other libraries disciple of retaining existing in sober university libraries. Use the survey method and adopted a questionnaire distributed to the research sample consisting of employees working in the libraries in question and the total number of forms that have been distributed (50) form .tousel search phrase conclusions from them .
1-The lack of authority control depends on it to find a
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DBN Rashid, Rimak International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020
Judicial jurisprudence is one of the important legal solutions to address the shortcomings of legislation. Throughout its long history, human societies have known many cases in which the judge finds himself facing a legislative vacuum in addition to civil legal texts that are difficult for the judge to implement due to ambiguity or contradiction, which requires diligence. To rule on resolving disputes before him in order not to deny justice, but the judge in his jurisprudence was not absolute, but rather bound by certain controls represented by observing the wisdom of legislation on the one hand and taking into account the nature of the texts on the other side, and from here this research came to shed light on the jurisprudence and its cont
... Show MoreThis paper studies the demonstratives as deictic expressions in Standard Arabic and English by outlining their phonological, syntactic and semantic properties in the two languages. On the basis of the outcome of this outline, a contrastive study of the linguistic properties of this group of deictic expressions in the two languages is conducted next. The aim is to find out what generalizations could be made from the results of this contrastive study.
Numerous research studies have been conducted on why some learners acquire a second language more easily and quickly than others. Most of these studies have demonstrated that acquiring a second language does not depend only on learners’ cognitive ability or professional teaching strategies. The learning language process is more complicated than that. It is affected by crucial factors that are beyond the control of learners and teachers. These factors are known as sociolinguistic factors. These factors include culture, age, motivation, socio-economic status, and gender. This research paper mainly concentrates on the role of motivation in second language acquisition.