BACKGROUND "Fright" is an English-speaking Caribbean idiom for an illness, or ethnomedical syndrome, of persistent distress. A parallel ethnopsychiatric idiom exists in the French Antilles as sésisma. Fright is distinct from susto among Hispanics, though both develop in the wake of traumatic events. West Indian ethnophysiology (ethnoanatomy) theorizes that an overload of stressful emotions (fea...

Electricity consumption of a building can be broken down into three different categories based on their end use. These categories are plug load, lighting load and mechanical load. This break down of electricity consumption is enabled by a Building Management System (BMS) which is powered by a collection of sensors in the building and a software. However, in the building management industry it i...

This paper examines a previously unstudied musical corpus derived from the polyphonic singing tradition of Epirus employing statistical methods. This analysis will mainly focus on unique harmonic aspects of these songs, which feature, for instance, unresolved dissonances (major second and minor seventh intervals) at structurally stable positions of the pieces (e.g. cadences). Traditional triadi...

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that motor simulation contributes to the processing of idioms. A semantic interference paradigm was applied. Critically, imageability of idioms was manipulated. Results of the experiments suggested that processing of highly imageable idioms involved motor simulation in both meaning and familiarity verification tasks. However, low-imageable i...

In this paper, methods for identification and delimitation of idiomatic expressions in large Web corpora are presented. The proposed methods are based on the observation that idiomatic expressions are sometimes accompanied by metalinguistic expressions, e.g. the word “proverbial”, the expression “as they say” or quotation marks. Even though the frequency of such idiom-related metalinguistic mar...

This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group). Laval (Journal of Pragmatics 35(2):723-739, 200...

the translator of a literary text has to observe the semantic sense of the words, the weight, the cultural setting, and other technical features of the original text to yield an acceptable translation in the tl. the accomplishment however is not that easy, for the translator meets some major impediments in performing the task. a translator who is familiar with different critical approaches, a t...