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The Impact of Outside Social Support on EFL Iraqis Learners’ Motivation at University Level
No full textThere are many reasons for learning a foreign or a second language. It might be for some learners, a kind of future income; while for others, it is only a hobby to learn about a new culture of a foreign country. The present study aims to investigate what factors play in learning English language. This paper also highlights the influence of the factor of outside social support such as good income job on the other factors of motivation. Data were gathered through scale questionnaire distributed to 60 EFL learners and 10 semi-structured interviews with randomly selected students from two different departments of English in two colleges, College of Arts and College of education for humanities at Anbar University, Iraq. The data were analyzed using SPSS tool. The results indicated that the motivation to learn English varied according to students’ intentions, goals and, attitudes towards learning. In addition, it shows a clear statistical correlation between the outside social support – finding better career and future opportunities and goal factors. Henceforth, the outside social support appears a significant contributor to the motivation of the EFL Iraqi learners
The Role of Metaphor in Advertisement Texts: A Psycholinguistic-Structural Study
No full textThis paper investigates the role and usage of metaphor in advertising texts from a psycho-linguistic, structural perspective. It adopts Al- Najjar (1984) structural classification of metaphor to go hand in hand with Frazier's (1987) perceptual theory of garden path of comprehension on the side of the advertisees. The analysis traces the impact of employing metaphorical texts in texting adverts. It discusses how, linguistically, unrelated words are connected together in terms of cognitive process (garden path). Indirect targeting of meaning by manipulating linguistic tools like structural options generates one of the most attractive factors for a text which is vagueness. Hovering around the exact wording of some meaning provides the advertiser enough space to insert multi-meanings, concepts, and ideas. As such, different unique impact can be made on the advertisees. The paper analyses some selected English advertising texts depending on an eclectic model made out of these two models. Finally, it ends with some conclusions which assure that relational metaphor is comprehended serially, while sentential metaphor is comprehended in a parallel garden path
'The Event', 'the Archive', and 'Realms That Are Yet to Come' in Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet
No full textTwo enigmas remain unsolved in the four novels of Paul Scott's the Raj Quartet: the engineer/performer of Daphne's rape which opens the whole tale and the engineer/performer of Merrick's murder which closes it. Both are ritualistic events engineered/performed patiently and carefully almost with the same scenario which gives confidence that the second is a vengeful sequence of the first. If we interrogate the Quartet in the light of postmodern discourses, some bizarre results can be found concerning these two crimes. Dealing with the Quartet as a detective story, reversing the narrative linear structure, and following the discourses of the event, the archive, and realms that are yet to come/the posthuman, reveal the scandalous superiority of the Eastern subject over the Western object which Scott dares not to say or avoids saying directly in the long course of his novels
A Linguistic Study of Praise with Reference to Arabic Religious Texts
No full textThis study explores praise as one of the expressive acts in Arabic. The love of praise is part of human nature and a sincere praise is an important tool in giving people confidence and hence making them feel happy and satisfied. The problem may increase when the speaker expresses his praise by using words of blame which might create some sort of ambiguity to the reader because he might understand it as blame rather than praise. For the sake of presenting and discussing the act of praising in Arabic, the present study aims at proving the linguistic devices of praise focusing on three aspects: pragmatic, semantic and syntactic in some religious texts. The theoretical part deals with investigating the pragmatic, semantic and syntactic aspects of praise as well as its types. The practical part deals with analyzing some religious texts taken from different aayas from different suras in the Glorious Quran. It is concluded that praise can be applied to religious texts depending on three aspects of language and Arabic language is distinguished by its heavy use of explicit and implicit forms expressing praise
The Discursive Construction of Gender as Social Identity in Arabic written Discourse
No full textIdentity is the idiosyncratic features that characterize an individual as being unique. It is the dynamic per formativeness of self through behaviors, acts, clothes and etc.. When such self is shared (by sharing memories, desires, and emotions) with others, it becomes social identity. Such an identity is, thus, changed, transformed, spoke out, acknowledged and never be fixed at any moment of life. The current study aims at studying the discursive construction of social identity in Arabic written discourse. It seeks to ponder the question of what linguistic devices do the Arab writers utilize to identify themselves in discourse and to show sameness and differences between in – and out- groups. To attain the above aim, we hypothesize that Arab writers use scanted discursive and linguistic devices to identify gender in their writing. Accordingly, seven linguistic and discursive components have been chosen to analyze the discourse to unveil the identity of its writer: processes, mood, modality, vocabulary and collocation, pronouns, figurative uses of language, and interdiscursivity. The study comes with some conclusions, the most important of which are: social identity can be traced in Arabic discourse through the construction of in _ and out_ groups with the in- group being victimized by the out-group who is the dominant, a conclusion which clashes with studies of critical discourse analysis, and changes and transformation of identity occur through stages including: attention, interest, solutions and urging by giving commands
Mid-Victorian England and Female Emancipation: Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South
No full textOne of the heated discussions of the Victorian era is female emancipation. In the heart of an industrial period when materialism, economic competition and public domain were dominated by men, women had the domestic sphere. The apparent difference between these two spheres was not tolerable for Elizabeth Gaskell and she critiqued it. Her novel North and South discusses the perceptions on women, the idea of industrialization, and class distinction in Victorian Era. Developing her main character Margaret Hale, Gaskell critiques her society and the mentality behind a perception of patriarchal and materialistic society. Gaskell develops her character on many different levels by giving her various roles especially in the industrial north. Valuing certain qualities women possess in the domestic level, Gaskell brings Margaret to the debates, businesses, factories, riots and public sphere of Milton. Gaskell presents the contemporary and Victorian readers with a different perception of women, their roles, and significance in the private and public spheres. One of the heated discussions of the Victorian era is female emancipation. In the heart of an industrial period when materialism, economic competition and public domain were dominated by men, women had the domestic sphere. The apparent difference between these two spheres was not tolerable for Elizabeth Gaskell and she critiqued it. Her novel North and South discusses the perceptions on women, the idea of industrialization, and class distinction in Victorian Era. Developing her main character Margaret Hale, Gaskell critiques her society and the mentality behind a perception of patriarchal and materialistic society. Gaskell develops her character on many different levels by giving her various roles especially in the industrial north. Valuing certain qualities women possess in the domestic level, Gaskell brings Margaret to the debates, businesses, factories, riots and public sphere of Milton. Gaskell presents the contemporary and Victorian readers with a different perception of women, their roles, and significance in the private and public spheres. 
Current Trends in English-Kurdish Movie Subtitling
No full textThis paper explores the current trends in audio-visual translation, in particular, movie subtitling from English into Sorani Kurdish in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. It is hypothesized that subtitling English movies into Sorani Kurdish is performed using various methods, i.e. there is no one standard method that is adopted. This is based on the second hypothesis that the majority of subtitled movies into Sorani Kurdish are carried out by unprofessional subtitlers. The results of the study show that the majority of the subtitlers replace the English captions of previously subtitled movies by Kurdish translations, using different devices and word processors. Thus, the study exhibits that there is no one standard established method for subtitling English movies into Sorani Kurdish. It further shows that Kurdish subtitlers lack professionalism in terms of English-Kurdish subtitling. 
Categorizing Declarative Speech Acts in English – Arabic Political Translation: A Pragmatic Study
No full textDeclarative speech acts are those acts that affect immediate changes in the world via their utterance. The specification of declarative speech acts raises problematic area as not all declarative utterances serve out performatively. The specificity of pragmatic conditions of declarative acts lead to another problem in that setting out the same function and affecting the same immediate change would not similarly be lexicalized in the two different natural languages. Therefore, declarative speech acts will pose difficulties for translators if they are unaware of categorizing their pragmatic conditions appropriately and integrating their process interpreting with affecting immediate perlocutionary purposively. Accordingly, it aims at: 1) setting some felicity conditions for determining sensibly whether the specified declarative expressions serve out performatively as genuine declarative acts or not. 2-Examining whether English declarative acts are perceived performatively in Arabic. 3- Exercising to what extents do the translators transfer declarative intentioned effects. and 4- Proposing certain pragmatic parameters for interpreting situational bounded expressions and providing some remedies for mistranslated verbs. The objective of the study is fairly confined to a number of declarative acts selected from dialogues, comments, statements and debates of English TV (e.g. Al-Jazeera TV, BBC, among many others). The main result shows that declarative acts are performatively influenced by contextual nature. The result also shows that many declarative expressions can alternatively name different illocutionary act. From functional perspective, the perception of English declarative acts is different from the Arabic one. Thus, the most accurate rendering of declarations is based on the correspondence between perception and immediate perloctionary affects
Signature Recognition Based on Discrete Wavelet Transform
Get PDFPersonal identification is an actively developing area of research. Human signature is a vital biometric attribute which can be used to authenticate human identity. There are many approaches to recognize signature with a lot of researches. The aim of this research is to introduce an efficient approach for signature recognition. This approach starts with the process the acquired signatures and stores these signatures in the database to be ready for verification. The collection of signature data based on collecting samples of 10 people and 10 signatures for each person through traditional ink stamp method. These signatures are digitized to be ready for processing. Many steps are applied to the acquired images to perform the pre-processing stage. The proposed approach based on discrete wavelet transforms to extract significant features from each signature image. Pre-processing is applied at the beginning of this approach to avoid any unwanted noise. This approach consists of many steps: Data acquisition, pre-processing, signature registration, and feature extraction. High recognition rate results (100%) are obtained through applying this approach
Happiness Measurement Via Classroom Based on Face Tracking: Happiness Via Classroom
No full textTeaching and learning are important factors in our life, so, increasing the happiness during class cause raising the ability of learning. This research focused on the evaluation of the learning process via classroom before and after applying the proposed method. One of the big challenge during classroom lesson, the students after a short period of time (about 10-15 minutes) at the beginning of the session, turn off their minds and remain absolutely out of understanding. Our goal is to revitalize the classroom environment so that you are always attentive to the lecture. The proposed approach aims to track and detect the emotional facial expression and transient from emotional facial expression to raise the happy expression in order to reach the classroom happiness. Image processing issue is an important part of this approach in which based on face recognition and tracking, then evaluates the students’ happiness according to the proposed mode that located in the classroom. This model is implemented from Raspberry Pi device, tracking camera and high definition screen. The implemented algorithm allows you to continue of face tracing and make rising of happiness as possible. Increasing happiness is an important factor in making students more attractive and more understanding for the classroom lecture. This approach is implemented to cover both software and hardware, so, it is acceptable to work in real time