Yerevan State Linguistic Universityafter V. Brusov
Course paper
Theme: Idioms in newspaper style
Yerevan 2009
Table of contents
Introduction
1.Idiom, general characteristics
2.Newspaper style Conclusion
Conclusion
Bibliography
english language newspapers publication
I ntroduction
Today the English language is widely spoken throughoutthe world. It is the language of 21st century the language of informative technologies,so while describing the English language; first of all it should be underlined thatthe English language is the mother tongue of the global media. To understand Englishclearly one should know not only its standard vocabulary but also its differentstyles, dialects, proverbs, sayings, phrasal verbs and idioms, as they are usedin any sphere: books, films, newspapers, formal speeches. One, looking through somepapers, magazines and journals, will discover the same language to sound quite different,because he will find familiar words with unfamiliar meanings. He will face idioms,phrasal verbs etc.
Besides, knowing the standard English perfectly one mayhave difficulties in understanding for instance American English, as many factors,such as culture, the natives 'language, slang, migration and development of thesame language apart in dissimilar conditions, cause many changes in the same Englishlanguage.
The focus of the research project in this paper is torepresent idioms in British and American newspapers. Moreover, the research showsinformation on history of English language newspapers, as well as on idioms.
English newspaper writing dates from the 17th century.The first newspaper carried only news, without comments, as commenting was consideredto be against the principals of journalism. By the 19th century, newspaper languagewas recognized as a particular variety of style, characterized by a specific communicativepurpose and its own system of language means.
It includes a system of interrelated lexical, phraseologicaland grammatical means serving the purpose of informing, instructing and, in addition,of entertaining the reader. The modern newspaper carries material of extremely diversecharacter. On the pages of a newspaper one can find not only news and comments onit, but also stories and poems, crossword puzzles and the like.
Thus we can point out two main functions of the newspaper:
1.Informative
2.Entertaining
In order to make the article sound lively and impressivethe author enriches the writing with idioms and a like.
An idiom is a phrase where the words together have meaningthat is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words. It isa phrase whose meaning cannot be made sense of from the literal definition, butrefers instead to a figurative meaning that is known only through common use, thatis an expression in the usage of the language that has a meaning that two or morethat means something other the literal meanings of its individual words.
Ex. Between a rock and a hard place: stuck between twovery bad options.
My coarse paper consists of the following chapters: Idiomsgeneral characteristics, and the usage of idioms in newspaper style.
In the first chapter we stated the definitions of idiomsby different scholars, their origin, the semantic and syntactic structure of idioms.We have also discussed the usage of idioms in American and British language.
In the second chapter we have discussed newspaper styleits origin and features.
Nowadays this theme is rather contemporary as everylearner must be prepared to meet the challenge simply because idioms occur so frequentlyin the spoken and written English.
1. Idiom, general characteristics
Idioms are found in every language and learning themis an important aspect of mastery of language. The English language is no exceptionas it contains a large number of idioms, which are extensively used. However, becauseof their rigid structure and quite unpredictable meaning, idioms are often considereddifficult to learn. John Seed defines an idiom as words collocated together happento become fossilized, becoming fixed over time. This collocation - words commonlyused in a group - changes the definition of each of the words that exist. As anexpression, the word-group becomes a team, so to speak. That is, the collocatedwords develop a specialized meaning as a whole and an idiom is born. An idiom isa group of words in which the meaning of this group is different than what wouldbe expected. If the actual words of an idiom were understood as they appear, theentire meaning would be changed and the group of words would make no sense in itscontext as if it was understood as to be an idiom. When a person uses an idiom,the listener might take the actual meaning wrong if he or she has not heard thisfigure of speech before. In someone's native language, idioms may be a natural partof speaking. Thus an idiom is not really considered to be set in a language. Theyare more in one's culture. Idioms are mostly for just one language. In some cases,when an idiom is translated into another language the meaning of the idiom is changedor does not make any sense as it once did in another language. Idioms are probablythe hardest thing for a person to learn in the process of learning a new language.This is because most people grow up using idioms as if their true meanings actuallymake sense. In the English expression В«to kick the bucketВ«, for example, a listenerknowing only the meaning of kick and bucket would be unable to deduce the expression'sactual meaning, which is to die. Although it can refer literally to the act of strikinga specific bucket with a foot, native speakers rarely use it that way. Another kindof idiom is the use of a single word to have multiple meanings, sometimes at thesame time, and sometimes one meaning to be discerned from context. This can be seenin the (mostly uninflected) English language in polysemes, the common use of thesame word for an ability, for those engaged in it, the product, place, or time ofan activity, and sometimes for a verb. Idioms tend to confuse those not alreadyfamiliar with them; students of a new language must learn its idiomatic expressionsthe way they learn its other vocabulary. Many natural language words have idiomaticorigins, but have been sufficiently assimilated so that their figurative senseshave been lost. An idiom is generally a colloquialmetaphor - a term which requires some foundational knowledge, information, or experience,to use only within a culture where parties must have common reference.
According to Stephen Cramley idiom is defined as В«acomplex item which is longer than a word-form but shorter then a sentence and whichhas a meaning that cannot be derived from the knowledge of its component parts В».
Raymond W. Gibbs suggests another definition of idiomaccording to which В«by the term idiom the speaker should learnВ« dead В»metaphorsand speech gambits by arbitrarily pairing each phrase some non - literal meaningwithout any awareness of why these phrases mean what they do В».
Gill Philip stated that В«idioms are class of multy-wordunits which pose a challenge to our understanding of grammar and lexics that hasn'tyet been fully met В».
Charles Hocket (1958) consider idiom В«as a modern linguisticagreement on one composed of two or more constituent parts generally deemed to bewords. The closer the wording of an idiom reflects a real world situation the easierit is to interpret В».
However some idioms can be more universally used thanothers, and they can be easily translated, metaphorical meaning can be more easilydeduced. While ...
