Idioms such as break a leg and piece of cake make up a significant portion of spoken and written discourse. Like other linguistic expressions stemming from conceptual metaphor (e.g., metaphors, similes), idioms serve to provide understanding of one concept in relation to a different concept (e.g., love is a journey). The ability to comprehend figurative expressions has an extended developmental period that begins as young as 5 years and continues into adulthood. The Language Experience Hypothesis attributes figurative language competence to meaningful exposure to figurative expressions. The Global Elaboration Hypothesis, however, proposes that figurative language comprehension depends upon skills needed for general text comprehension (e.g., ability to make inferences, semantic knowledge). Studies with children and adolescents have shown that reading comprehension relates to both idiom familiarity and comprehension. Similar studies have not been conducted with adult struggling readers. This study examined idiom familiarity and comprehension of adult struggling readers (N = 60; M age = 41 years) in relation to their reading skills. The Idiom Familiarity and Idiom Comprehension tasks developed by Nippold and colleagues (1993, 2001) were used, which allowed for comparisons between the performance of adult struggling readers in this study and past research. Participants’ idiom comprehension scores were lower than those of adults studied in previous research, and comparable to those of children reading at similar levels. Their familiarity rankings of individual idioms aligned with the levels established by Nippold and Rudzinski (1993); however, they were less familiar with idioms than the twelfth grade group. Results from a familiarity (high, moderate, low) x context (isolation, story) ANOVA showed story context helped adult struggling readers comprehend more high-familiarity idioms, but hindered comprehension of low-familiarity idioms. Hierarchical regressions revealed that reading comprehension accounted for unique variance over and beyond idiom familiarity and word reading skills for idioms presented in both isolation and story contexts. Findings from this study contribute to the study of figurative language comprehension by examining adults with limited literacy skills. Similarly, these findings contribute to the field of adult literacy by providing initial evidence of adult struggling readers’ familiarity and comprehension of idioms.

and Keywords The aim of this thesis is comparison of 6 selected somatic words (head, eye, nose, ear, mouth, heart) in Czech and Japanese idioms based on the data collected from available idiomatic dictionaries in both languages. The theoretical part explains the approach to idiomatic and phraseological units in Japanese and Czech language (definition and characteristic features of idioms including their classification), followed by presenting the cognitive methodology used for analyzing the corpus incorporating semantic categories for idiom classification based on their somatic words in a role of idiom components. The practical part is structured into chapters focusing on the selected somatic words successively, where a dictionary definition precedes the introduction of semenatic categories for each somatic word, including the background information for practical use of those idioms. The final part presents the summary of the semantic class analysis limited to gathered idiomatic data, and conclusions that we could reach after the analysis was completed. Keywords: idioms, Japanese idioms, Czech idioms, cognitive linguistics, semantic categories, somatic words, human body

This paper primarily focuses on the description of the results of a study conducted on ten Chinese university students ESL learners to investigate  whether or not cultural context has a significant impact on university students’ ability to remember and understand English figurative idioms as part of English as a Second Language instruction in China. Since Idiom  is a kind of language block which concord rich cultural elements and the figurative idiom whose meaning cannot be easy inferred by the usual meaning of its constituent elements, so the present study was based on the relationship between culture and language, the origins of the idioms and their cultural connotations. As some scholars’ studies have shown before, knowing the origins and the source domains of the idioms can enhance the learners motivation, then their comprehension and retention of idioms are improved. The present study also demonstrates that the cultural context can facilitate learners understanding and memorization of the English figurative idiom.

Idiomatiska uttryck är vanliga i språket och utgör en viktig del av vårt immateriella kulturarv. Därför syftar denna studie till att undersöka förståelsen av tre kategorier av idiomatiska uttryck: begränsade kollokationer, figurativa idiom och rena idiom. Dessutom jämförs förståelsen av uttrycken mellan elever i grundskolans årskurs nio, gymnasiets årskurs tre och svensklärarstudenter. Undersökningen gjordes med en fysisk enkät som delades ut till totalt 135 respondenter, och resultatet visar att förståelsen av de begränsade kollokationerna var högre än förståelsen av de rena idiomen. Högstadieeleverna hade generellt lägre förståelse jämfört med gymnasieeleverna och svensklärarstudenterna, vilka i sin tur genererade förhållandevis likartade svar.

The current study builds upon previous UK EAL research by i. sampling EAL children who do not struggle with reading comprehension and ii. investigating participants’ semantic ability at the word, sentence and discourse levels. Four groups of 9-10 year old children were recruited: EAL Average Readers; EL1 Average Readers; EAL Above Average Readers; EL1 Above Average Readers. At the word level, EL1 participants significantly outperformed EAL participants on 2 out of 6 vocabulary measures administered (TOWK Expressive Vocabulary and Multiple Contexts). The results of an idiom comprehension measure (ICM) showed that EAL and EL1 participants did not differ in their ability to engage in semantic analysis or in inference from context (semantic ability at the sentence and at the discourse levels respectively). The EL1 Above Average group alone were able to use prior experience with English language idioms to their advantage when answering the ICM. For the EAL participants, relationships between performance on the TOWK Expressive Vocabulary and Multiple Contexts and on the ICM are stronger than for the EL1 participants. The relationships between performance on the ICM and on a measure of reading comprehension are also stronger for EAL than for EL1 participants. These results suggest the following: i. it is important to develop the vocabulary abilities of EAL children, as the relationships between word-level semantic skills and sentence/discourse level semantic skills are stronger for EAL children than for their EL1 peers; ii. the relationships between the knowledge and skills measured by the ICM (i.e. prior knowledge of English language idioms; semantic analysis; inference from context) and reading comprehension are stronger for EAL than for EL1 children, suggesting the importance of a comprehensive approach to the semantic development of EAL children.

Idioms play an important role in language acquisition but learners do not have sufficient time to learn all of them. Therefore, learners need to focus on the most frequently occurring idioms, which can be determined by corpus searches. Building off previous corpus studies, this study generated a comprehensive list of English idioms by combining lists from several sources and developed a methodology for organizing and sorting idioms within the list. In total, over 27,000 idiom forms were amalgamated and a portion of the list was compiled, which featured 2,697 core idioms and 5,559 variant idiom forms. It was found that over 35% of idioms varied structurally and thirteen types of idiom variation were highlighted. Additionally, issues concerning idiom boundaries were investigated. These results are congruent with previous findings which show that variation is a commonly occurring element of idioms. Furthermore, specific problematic elements for future corpus searches and English language learners are identified.

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Uppsatsen beskriver genom en replikationsstudie på Käppen i hjulen (2010) av Julia Prentice hur gymnasieelever med svenska som modersmål och svenska som andraspråks förståelse för konventionaliserade uttryck relaterar till deras kunskaper i svenska. Undersökningen genomfördes genom två enkäter där deltagarna fick göra ett nivåplaceringstest från Medborgarskolan samt en enkät som testade förståelsen för konventionaliserade uttryck. Resultatet visar att elever med svenska som förstaspråk hade en större kunskap för konventionaliserade uttryck än för den allmänna språknivån medan elever med svenska som andraspråk visade på motsatt resultat. Resultatet visade också att ju högre resultat eleverna hade på språknivåtestet desto högre resultat hade de på testet av de konventionaliserade uttrycken.

In this paper I use the Distributional Morphology framework and semantic Locality Constraints proposed by Arad (2003) to look at category assignments of blends in Modern Hebrew, as well as blends, compounds and idioms in English where relevant. Bat-El (1996) provides an explicit phonological analysis of Modern Hebrew blends, and argues against any morphological process at play in blend formation. I argue, however, that blends and compounds must be accounted for within morphology due to category assignments. I first demonstrate that blends are unquestionably formed by blending fully inflected words rather than roots, and then subsequently reject an analysis that accounts for weakened Locality Constraints by proposing the formation of a new root. Instead, I propose a hypothesis of Idiomatic Root Merge where a root can be an n-place predicate that selects at least an XP sister and a category head. This proposal also entails that there is a structural difference between two surface-similar phrases that have respectively literal and idiomatic meanings.

No description available.