The Effect of etymology elaboration on EFL learners’ comprehension and retention of idioms

This article reports on a study that investigated the impact of etymological elaboration on EFL students’ comprehension and retention of English idioms. The participants for the study were 32 Iranian upper- intermediate EFL students. They were members of two intact classes randomly assigned to an experimental and a comparison group. The treatment lasted for six two-hour sessions, during each session of which the participants in both groups received five idioms which they were supposed to define. The participants in the experimental group received the idioms along with the pertinent etymological elaborations, while the participants in the comparison group received the same idioms without etymological elaborations. The results revealed that etymological elaboration has a positive effect on EFL students’ comprehension and subsequent retention of idioms

On the Origins of Some English Idioms and the Adequacy of Their Definitions in the Georgian Dictionaries (II Part)

The aim of this article is to fill the informative gap and to overcome those difficulties which arise in case of not having the adequate interpetation or exact definition of the English idioms in the Georgian dictionaries.This paper investigates some idiomatic expressions and observes how often they are used in the modern English publicist texts from “The Guardian”, “Fortune”, “The Scotsman”, “The Independent” etc. whether they have preserved their original meanings or obtained some other new senses and coloring. More than this, the goal is to research if there is an adequate translation or interpretation of those English idioms in the Georgian language bilingual dictionaries. If there is not any, then the objective is how to make their adequate Georgian equivalents and, as a result to compose a new mini-dictionary of idioms. The urgent need for etymological study of idioms is also stimulated by the fact that the phraseology condensates the complex interaction of the culture and psychology of people, national self-being and their unique metaphoric mentality The reaserch value is dectated by its outcome, namely, it will be the research not only of those idioms which have the adequate definitions in the Georgian dictionaries, but find out some cases of not having the right definition and in result to compile the mini be-lingual dictionary of idioms. It can be assumed, that it will make a siginificant contribution to the development of lexicography in Georgia

Idioms for µ-charts

This paper presents an idiomatic construct for µ-charts which reflects the high-level specification construct of synchronization between activities. This, amongst others, has emerged as a common and useful idea during our use of µ-charts to design and specify commonly-occurring reactive systems. The purpose of this example, apart from any inherent interest in being able to use synchronization in a specification, is to show how the very simple language of µ-charts can used as a basis for a more expressive language built by definitional extension

Programming Idioms for Transactional Events

Transactional events (TE) are an extension of Concurrent ML (CML), a programming model for synchronous message-passing. Prior work has focused on TE's formal semantics and its implementation. This paper considers programming idioms, particularly those that vary unexpectedly from the corresponding CML idioms. First, we solve a subtle problem with client-server protocols in TE. Second, we argue that CML's wrap and guard primitives do not translate well to TE, and we suggest useful workarounds. Finally, we discuss how to rewrite CML protocols that use abort actions

Examining the Tip of the Iceberg: A Data Set for Idiom Translation

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has been widely used in recent years with significant improvements for many language pairs. Although state-of-the-art NMT systems are generating progressively better translations, idiom translation remains one of the open challenges in this field. Idioms, a category of multiword expressions, are an interesting language phenomenon where the overall meaning of the expression cannot be composed from the meanings of its parts. A first important challenge is the lack of dedicated data sets for learning and evaluating idiom translation. In this paper we address this problem by creating the first large-scale data set for idiom translation. Our data set is automatically extracted from a widely used German-English translation corpus and includes, for each language direction, a targeted evaluation set where all sentences contain idioms and a regular training corpus where sentences including idioms are marked. We release this data set and use it to perform preliminary NMT experiments as the first step towards better idiom translation.Comment: Accepted at LREC 201