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

An automatic text summarization system mimics how humans summarize by picking the most ‎significant sentences in a source text. However, the complexities of the Arabic language have become ‎challenging to obtain information quickly and effectively. The main disadvantage of the ‎traditional approaches is that they are strictly constrained (especially for the Arabic language) by the ‎accuracy of sentence feature ‎functions, weighting schemes, ‎and similarity calculations. On the other hand, the meta-heuristic search approaches have a feature tha

La condicionalidad en árabe, supongo como en otras lenguas, constituye una noción amplia que puede expresarse mediante diferentes construcciones sintácticas. La mayor parte de los especialistas coinciden en señalar que las estructuras condicionales son, probablemente, la clase más compleja de expresión compuesta en árabe. Se utilizan para expresar una condición de la que depende la realización de lo expuesto en la oración principal. Las estructuras condicionales son una de las principales vías lingüísticas de las que dispone el individuo para expresar su capacidad de imaginar situaciones diferentes a las reales; de crear mundos posibles; de soñar con situaciones pasadas que podrían haber sido diferentes; de ocultar lo fact

Gender and culture are among the factors that influence the process of understanding and interpreting different types of communication, especially images. The current study, which is a part of a master’s thesis, aims at investigating the role of gender and culture in interpreting and understanding the caricatures that deal with women’s issues in Arab societies. To this end, the researchers adopted Barthes’ (1957) concepts of denotation and connotation in his theory of mythologies in addition to Langacker’s (1987) theory of (Domains). The research concludes that the female subjects have better cognitive abilities in investing the signs within the selected caricatures. The other factor the study reached to is that the respondents

Abstract: This article is a comparative analysis of the concept and types of homonyms in Russian and Arabic. Homonyms are lexical units that have the same sound but different meanings. The study of homonymy in different languages can help reveal the features of the semantic structure and syntactic rules of each language. The article discusses the main aspects of homonymy in Russian and Arabic, as well as a comparative analysis of the types of homonyms that exist in both languages. The study includes an analysis of the semantic meanings of homonyms, their use in context, and possible differences in syntactic features that may affect their interpretation and perception by native speakers of these languages. The purpose of the article is to id

Purpose of research: The purpose of the article is to conduct a comparative analysis of the concept and types of puns in the Russian and Arabic languages. The main focus is on identifying similarities and differences in the definition of a pun, as well as analyzing its various types in both languages. The purpose of the study is to understand how puns are used to achieve comic or semantic effect in different cultural contexts.

Methods: The study includes an analysis of literature providing information about puns in Russian and Arabic. For comparative analysis, methods were used to compare concepts, definitions and types of puns in both languages. The phonetic, semantic and syntactic aspects of the pun are considered,

The dramatic series on television have a great impact on people’sattitudes towards dialects of language varieties, by relating theconceptual pictures or prototypes presented by series’ characters tothose dialects. This study aims to show the influence of TV series onIraqi university learners’ gender and age in relating positive ornegative semantic qualities to their dialects. To this end, 150 Iraqi EFLlearners have participated in this study to examine their attitudestowards Baghdadi, Mousli and Nasiriya dialects. The data arecollected by Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, Fillenbaum's (1960)matched guise technique and then labeled by Willmorth’s (1988)subjective reaction test. A structured interview is conducted to supportthe data

This study aims to reveal the similarities and differences between Iraqi and Malay university learners and their genders in producing the supportive moves of criticism. To this end, 30 Iraqi and 30 Malay university learners have participated in this study. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and a Focus Group Interview (FGI) are conducted to elicit responses from the participants. Nguyen’s (2005) classification of criticism supportive moves is adapted to code the data. The data are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. Overall, the findings unveil that both groups use similar categories of supportive moves, but Iraqis produce more of these devices than Malays in their criticisms. Although both females and males of both groups use id

This research analyses the tweets of Iraqi politicians (leaders) that took place simultaneously with the formation of the Iraqi government after the elections in 2018. The formation of the Iraqi government was considered one of the most critical issues that emerged in the political process to which the Iraqi media as well as social networking sites paid considerable attention. In this regard, Iraqi political leaders have published many tweets concerning the formation of the government, some of them have caused great controversy in the political climate. As Twitter is one of the most digital platforms that have been widely used on the global scale in recent years, politicians have employed it to publish their opinions, ideas, and to excha