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This study is an attempt to investigate the acquisition of translation competence of the English tense and aspect system by Behdini learners who are students at the Translation Department at the College of Languages in the University of Duhok. This paper is an experimental study that adopts the Translation Competence Acquisition model. There are many morphological and syntactic differences between English and Behdini tense and aspect and there are differences in terms of the usage of the tense and aspect between the two mentioned languages too. A Judgement Elicitation Task is employed as a tool to collect data in this study. 4o English sentences with their translations into Behdini are included in this task. Behdini learners are asked to make their judgements on each translated sentence. These test items are a mixture of four tenses: present continuous, present perfect, past continuous, and past perfect. Two subgroups of learners are involved in this study: the senior subgroup and the fresher subgroup in an attempt to investigate the effect of participants’ English language level and proficiency. Mixed-effects modeling has been used for analysing the data statistically. The lmer package (version is 3.3.1) has been employed with logit link function and binomial variance for the judgement data in R, which is an open-source language and environment for statistical computing. The main hypothesis of the study is that Behdini learners are not expected to attain a complete translation competence regarding the English tense and aspect system due to the differences between the two languages. The main results of the study show that while Behdini learners were able to attain a good translation competence in terms of accepting the grammatical translations, they failed to reject the ungrammatical translations. These findings implicate that Behdini learners’ acquisition of translation competence is not attained fully. It is also shown that Behdini students at lower proficiency levels employ their L1 grammar as the first stage of their translation process, but at later stages of proficiency parameter resetting becomes more possible.

Behdini, a variety of Kurdish, is known to be a morphologically rich language demonstrating both subject and object case marking in an unusual typological distribution. This paper reviews differential object marking (DOM) and differential subject marking (DSM) exemplified by a number of allocated languages, and then DOM and DSM are tested whether they apply on Behdini. This study is designed to answer whether Behdini shows DOM or DSM or whether the way Behdini argument structures are encoded in split ergativity completely governs the case marking of objects and subjects in Behdini. Therefore, ergativity in Behdini is tackled in this study. Data to be applied on Behdini in the process of analysing DOM and DSM are inspired from various studies, and my own linguistic knowledge of Behdini is used for the analysis. The results of the study show that the way split ergativity operates in Behdini entirely accounts for object and subject case marking, concluding that Beddini does not demonstrate DOM and DSM.

The acquisition of English grammatical articles by non-native speakers of English language has been the main concern of a wide range of research, especially in languages whose grammatical article system functions differently from the English grammatical article system. Behdini is a variety whose grammatical article system is different from that English grammatical parameter. Thus, the acquisition of L2 English articles among L1 Behdini speakers is investigated in this study along proposals based on the Interpretability Hypothesis (Hawkins & Hattori, 2006; Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007; Hawkins & Casillas, 2008), and the Full Transfer Full Access (FT/FA) hypothesis (Schwartz and Sprouse , 1994, 1996).The researcher developed a Judgement Elicitation Task (JET) based on the following research question:Will Behdini learners' English language proficiency level play a role in participants' judgements? Will these learners be able to acquire English definite, indefinite, and zero articles systematically? In other words, is any development expected in Behdini learners' acquisition of English articles?40 Behdini L2 English learners took part in the Judgement Elicitation Task . English learners took an English language proficiency test based on which they were roughly grouped into three sub-groups: elementary (11 participants), intermediate (22 participants), and advanced (7 participants). All participants took two tests: an acceptability judgment test including 46 items (34 pure test items + 12 filler gaps) and a proficiency test with 40 items.The results of the study show that there is a transfer from L1 into the L2ers' English interlanguage due to the finding that most participants, disregarding their proficiency level, failed to reject the ungrammatical sentences in almost all the categories. The study finds support for the FT/FA proposal, where first language transfer, second language input and access to universal grammar features are argued to have impacts on Learners of English article acquisition among L1 Behdini learners. The result also show that learners of English fluctuate in their choice of articles, which is interpreted by the predictions made by the Fluctuation Theory. Uninterpretable features also, proved to be difficult to acquire by Behdini learners, a point that can be interpreted the base form of the Interpretability Hypothesis.

This study investigates the ways in which Syriac native speakers from Iraq conceptualise their understandings of various abstract domains, feelings, emotions, actions, customs, traditions and practices through their experiences of the concrete fields of food and drink metaphors. The conceptual metaphor theory (1980) by Lackoff and Johnson has been adopted for the data analysis. A focus group discussion (FGD) was employed as a tool for data collection and 43 idiomatic food and drink expressions were collected from this. Five native Syriac speakers from various regions and of different genders, ages, tribes and nationalities participated in the discussion. The study shows that Syriac speakers use many food and drink metaphors in their everyday language. The study concludes that food and drink metaphors are used by Syriac speakers mostly to conceive abstract concepts related to feelings, attitudes and emotions. The study shows that foods and drinks are strongly rooted in the Assyrian and Chaldean culture and many traditional dishes are used in its vernacular language as metaphors.