Magistro baigiamojo darbo objektas yra angliškų idiomų struktūra bei semantika anglų grožinėje literatūroje ir jų vertimas į lietuvių kalbą. Todėl šio darbo tikslas yra ištyrinėti, kaip angliškos idiomos O.Vaildo „Doriano Grėjaus portretas“ ir A.Merdok „Jūra, jūra...“ romanuose yra verčiamos į lietuvių kalbą ir kaip pasikeičia jų stilistika bei semantika. Pagrindiniai tyrimo metodai yra šie: gretinamasis, statistinis ir mokslinės literatūros analizės metodas. Teorinėje darbo dalyje pristatomos įvairių užsienio ir Lietuvos autorių suformuluotos junginių darybos, idiomatiškumo ir idiomos sąvokos, išskiriami trys pagrindiniai idiomos aspektai: reikšmė, struktūra, funkcija, pateikiama 14 idiomų tipų anglų kalboje, nurodomi pagrindiniai idiomų vertimo metodai, idiomų vertimo sunkumai, apibrėžiamas vertėjo tikslas ir vertimo kokybės svarba. Praktinėje darbo dalyje pristatomas angliškų idiomų vertimas dviejuose romanuose, pateikiamos rekomendacijos, kaip geriau būtų galima jas i��versti į lietuvių kalbą. Tyrimo rezultatai patvirtina moksliniame darbe iškeltą hipotezę, kad vertimo proceso metu idiomų semantikos, stilistikos ir struktūros lygmenyse įvyksta ryškūs pokyčiai.

xiii, 205 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / This study examined idiom understanding in 120 neurologically healthy adults, ages 20-29 (20s Group), 40-49 (40s Group), 60-69 (60s Group), and 80-89 (80s Group) years old. Each participant was administered a familiarity task, definition explanation task, mental imagery task, and forced-choice comprehension task. Twenty idioms, 10 transparent and 10 opaque, were used with no supporting contexts. Participants were asked to rate the familiarity of each idiom, to provide a definition of each, to generate a mental image of each, and to select the best definition of each from among four options. It was predicted that younger and older adults would perform equally well on the comprehension task but that older adults would perform poorer than younger adults on the explanation task. Additionally, mental imagery of idioms was expected to become more figurative with advancing age, and participants were expected to perform better on highly familiar and transparent idioms than on less familiar and opaque ones. Participants rated all 20 idioms as highly familiar, with the lowest familiarity rating for participants in the 20s Group. No significant differences were found on the forced-choice comprehension task across the four age groups although the 20s Group scored the lowest among all age groups. The 60s Group performed significantly better than the 20s Group on the definition explanation task, but no significant differences were found between the other age groups. No significant differences were found in generating mental images between transparent and opaque idioms, and mental images tended to be figurative rather than literal for both types of idioms. The present study adds to our knowledge of idiom understanding across adulthood. Familiarity seemed to play a stronger role than transparency in idiom understanding in adults. Once an idiom was learned and stored as a lexical unit, people used the idiomatic meaning and generated figurative mental imagery immediately without accessing the literal meaning or the literal mental image. / Committee in charge: Marilyn Nippold, Chairperson, Special Education and Clinical Sciences; Roland Good, Member, Special Education and Clinical Sciences; Deborah Olson, Member, Special Education and Clinical Sciences; Nathaniel Teich, Outside Member, English

Master of Science / Psychological Sciences / Richard J. Harris / Figurative language use is not limited to poetry or literature but is a ubiquitous part of speech. Studies that looked at figurative language comprehension have shown that some cognitive mechanisms, such as working memory, may be involved in figurative language comprehension. For example, individuals with high working memory span tend to produce deeper metaphor interpretations. The current work was interested in how working memory is involved in a particular figure of speech comprehension: idioms. An idiom is a phrase whose meaning cannot be simply deduced from the literal meanings of the words that comprise that idiom. Idioms can vary according to their compositionality, which refers to the extent with which meanings of the idiom constituents provide cues for the idiom's idiomatic meaning. A number of researchers agreed upon certain idioms being decomposable and other idioms being fixed. The two different types were used in the Main Study. Models of idiom comprehension also vary from traditional "lexical look-up" models that consider idioms as multi-word lexical units stored as such in speakers' mental lexicons to "nonlexical" models, such as the Configuration Hypothesis, that states that an idiom as a whole does not have a separate lexical representation in the mental lexicon. Both models are considered in this work. Finally, understanding idiomatic expressions may require inhibiting irrelevant literal information. For example, literal meanings of the words dogs and cats in an idiom it is raining cats and dogs have to be inhibited in order to gather the figurative meaning of the expression. Thus, the main objective of the current work was to assess the role of working memory in idiom comprehension, as well as to explore whether idiom compositionality had an effect on how fast idioms were interpreted, while also considering implications for the two main models of idiom comprehension. A Preliminary Study narrowed down the list of idioms to the 26 that were used in the Main study, ensuring that both types of idioms did not differ in familiarity or length. The Main Study consisted of four tasks: working memory (Operation span task), inhibition (reading with distractions), idiom comprehension, and familiarity. Seventy-three general psychology students participated in the Main Study. The data were analyzed by several regression analyses and t-tests. The main finding was that there seems to be a difference in a way the two accepted types of idioms are interpreted: fixed idioms were interpreted faster than decomposable idioms. This is consistent with the lexical lookup hypothesis but only for fixed idioms and suggests that readers may not have to analyze the literal word meanings of fixed idioms when interpreting them, thus making their interpretation faster, since retrieving is faster than computing. Neither familiarity nor idiom length could account for this difference. On the other hand, neither operation span nor the number of critical errors committed by participants on the inhibition task predicted how long it took participants to interpret either type of idioms. Several possible explanations for such results are discussed, as well as the limitations and future directions.

Det övergripande syftet med denna studie var att granska gymnasieskolungdomars generella förståelse av idiom. Vidare syftade studien även till att analysera eventuella skillnader utifrån kön samt även gymnasieprograminriktning. Studien genomfördes via en digital enkätundersökning bestående av flervalsfrågor samt två olika typer av lucktest. Det ena lucktestet var kontextberoende medan det andra lucktestet var kontextoberoende. Studien visade att den generella förståelsen för idiom hos gymnasieskolungdomar var genomgående låg. Studien visade även att flickor besitter en något högre kunskap om idiom än pojkar, oavsett gymnasieprograminriktning. Slutligen visade studien att det finns stora skillnader i förståelsen för idiom utifrån gymnasieprograminriktning hos den manliga gruppen av informanter. Utifrån studiens resultat drogs slutsatserna att flickor och pojkar uppvisar olika mått av förståelse av idiom samt att den generella förståelsen överlag är låg.

Orientadora: Profª. Drª. Maria Teresa Carthery-Goulart / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal do ABC, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Neurociência e Cognição, 2017. / Uma série de modelos e hipóteses já foram propostas para descrever como o cérebro processa figuras de linguagem. Uma questão central no debate dessa temática é se a compreensão de figuras de linguagem configura um tipo especial de material linguístico que desvie dos processos comuns de processamento da linguagem (literal), demandando mecanismos adicionais para a compreensão. A técnica de potencial relacionado a evento (ERP), focado no marcador eletrofisiológico N400, tem sido a ferramenta mais comum para obtenção de evidências sobre o acesso ao sentido figurativo, fornecendo indícios sobre como se comportam as etapas do curso de processamento figurativo em comparação ao literal. No entanto, algumas controvérsias sobre o seu uso podem surgir pela interpretação da funcionalidade do N400 e quais tipos de variáveis têm potencial de influenciar os níveis desse marcador. A presente dissertação é dividida em dois estudos, o primeiro teve como objetivo verificar e sumarizar os usos da componente N400 em uma revisão crítica da literatura sobre quais tipos de processos o N400 indexa. O segundo estudo foi feito em abordagem experimental com o objetivo de investigar o curso temporal do processamento semântico de verbos empregados de forma figurativa. Os participantes foram submetidos a uma tarefa de julgamento de plausibilidade de três tipos de sentenças (metafóricas, idiomáticas e literais), em que foram registrados os tempos de reação e, simultaneamente, as respostas eletrofisiológicas para cada condição. Os dados comportamentais demonstraram que o processamento de sentenças idiomáticas é mais rápido que as demais condições e que as metáforas foram a condição com maior demanda de tempo de processamento. Os resultados do EEG mostraram que as sentenças idiomáticas não apresentaram a deflexão negativa característica do N400, por outro lado, as metafóricas e literais apresentaram grandes picos de N400, mas sem diferenças estatisticamente significantes entre si. Os resultados evidenciam que não há efeito de figuratividade na janela temporal do N400, mas indicam possíveis efeitos mais tardios do julgamento do sentido figurado relacionados com os tempos de reação. Esses resultados dão suporte a hipótese de Saliência Graduada e Teoria do Mapeamento Conceitual, além disso, a dissertação como um todo fornece evidências que corroboram com a visão de acesso lexical do N400. / A number of models and hypotheses have been proposed to describe how the brain process figurative language. A central question is whether the comprehension of figurative language configures a special kind of linguistic material that deviates from the common mechanism of language processing (literal), so demanding additional processing for the comprehension. The event-related potential (ERP) technique, focused on the N400 electrophysiological marker, has been the most common way for obtaining evidence on the access to the figurative meaning. However, some controversies over its use may arise from the interpretation of the N400 functionality and which types of variables have been considered confounding factors of this potential. The present dissertation is divided in two studies: the first one aimed at verifying and summarizing the uses of the N400 component in a critical review of the literature on what types of processes the N400 indexes. The second study was done in an experimental approach aimed to investigating the temporal course of the semantic processing of verbs used figuratively. The participants undertook a plausibility judgment task of three conditions of sentences (metaphorical, idiomatic and literal), in which the reaction times were recorded and, simultaneously, electrophysiological responses. In the behavioral study, it was observed that the processing of idiomatic sentences is much faster than two other conditions, and the metaphors are longer than literal. The EEG results showed that the idiomatic sentences did not present the negative deflection characteristic of the N400; on the other hand, the metaphorical and literal ones presented large peaks of N400, but without significant statistical differences between them. The results show that there is no figurative effect in the N400 temporal window, but they indicate possible later effects of the judgment of the figurative sense, related to reaction times. Our study provides evidence that metaphorical processing has no literal content differences in the first processing window. These results support the hypothesis of Graduated Salience and Conceptual Mapping Theory, in addition, the dissertation as a whole provides evidence that corroborate with the lexical access view of the N400.

Den här studien handlar om metaforiska lexikaliserade fraser, alltså idiom. Det primära syftet är att ta reda på huruvida elever i grundskolans senare år förstår idiom. Ett sekundärt syfte är att se om det finns idiomförståelseskillnader mellan elever som lever i olika delar av samhället. I den här studien undersöks skillnaden mellan stad och landsbygd. Studien har genomförts via en enkätundersökning med flervalsfrågor, som delats ut i några grundskolor. I varje enkät finns 24 av svenskans kroppsdelsidiom. Varje idiom är försett med fyra olika svarsalternativ. Resultaten visar att informanterna inte har tillägnat sig betydelsen av en rad idiom som är relativt vanliga i talspråk, men också i skrivet språk, framför allt i tidningstexter. Resultaten visar också att det finns skillnader mellan de två informantgrupperna, framförallt gällande förståelsen av enskilda idiom. Till exempel så förstår eleverna på landsbygden idiomet gå på knäna i större utsträckning än de i staden, medan de i staden i förstår vara en nagel i ögat bättre än de på landsbygden.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how idioms help the building of opposing characters in a literary work and also what similarities and differences there are in the usage of idioms between the characters. The material, i.e. the idioms, in this study was manually collected from Othello written by William Shakespeare. The material was analyzed and categorized according to a list of idiomatic properties. The material was also analyzed according to the tone of the idioms. The results showed that there was not any prominent difference in usage of idioms between the two characters; neither in general nor in the tone of the idiom. The results suggested, however, that the idioms were used in a negative sense, regardless of character.

No description available.

1 Abstract The topic of this thesis is Czech and Spanish phrasemes containing denominations of animals or parts of their bodies. Theoretical part of this thesis deals with delimitation of the concepts of phraseme, idiom etc., it describes the various attitudes to these issues in the Czech and Spanish field. The practical part, which is based on the theoretical premises, focuses on analysis of idiomatic expressions enlisted in a vocabulary attached to the thesis. The practical part further examines the vocabulary from different points of view, focuses on the extent of equivalency among individual idioms, frequency of use in particular languages, affiliation with the specific zoological categories and etymology of selected phrases. The target of this thesis is to identify both the differences and the similarities among the idioms.

This diploma thesis deals with the Russian reflexive pronoun «себя» in comparison with the Czech pronoun. The aim of this thesis is to compile a set of exercises for students of the Russian language in order to eliminate mistakes in connection with this topic. The thesis is divided into two parts - a theoretical and a practical part. The theoretical part is based on specialized (academical) literature. This part contains general characteristics and classifications of pronouns. It focuses on issues with the Russian reflexive pronoun and its Czech equivalents. It also includes a chapter about transfer and interference. The practical part proceeds from the theoretical part and from a questionnaire. The questionnaire was completed by the first-year students of the Faculty of Education. On the basis of its results, general conclusions and proposals of exercises for acquiring the topic are formulated and intended for students of the Russian language.