Reviewer: Rafael Marcos Tort Peixoto1

Book Title: O Jeito que a gente diz: combinações consagradas em Inglês e Português.
Book Editors: Stella E. O. Tagnin.
Publisher: Disal Editores: São Paulo-SP, 2013.

Overview
The book published in 2013 by Stella Tagnin (image to the
right) is a lexical study of the English language and its translations
into German, Spanish, French and Italian. To be more precise, the
author works with the translation of idioms and other linguistic
units that require an accurate pragmatic knowledge on the foreign
language.
The title of this work refers to the linguistic conventions
commonly used in a given society. Tagnin also believes that
conventional means language in use, what people often say and use,
following common standards without being original when it comes to new linguistic forms.
Over the course of this work, the author describesin detail the terms ‘conventionality’
and ‘idiomaticity’, because the work is linked to a pragmatic approach of language, which at
first is not presented in the early sections of the book.
In the definition of conventionality, the author presents a somewhat general definition
of conventionality based on some concepts from the Concise Oxford Dictionary – she shows
some concepts from the Concise Oxford Dictionary – combining social convention with
language, exemplifying with the wordswhen referring to the former and how referring to the
latter.
Within pragmatics, the term ‘conventionality’ is defined by O'Keeffe (2011) as a
principle of language acquisition, in which language speakers expect certain word(s) to be used
in a situation or context, according to the standards of alinguistic community. I would suggest
that Tagnin (2013) made use of references from other authors from the area toenrichher work,
thus better situating the role of Corpus Linguistics within idiomaticity, presented in Chapter 4.
Sardinha (2004) explains that when it comes to analyzing idiomaticity, it is essential to
use a resource that is independent of our intuition: such as a corpus for instance. In Corpus
Linguistics, a corpus is defined as a collection of written texts and speech transcripts stored in
an electronic format that can be investigated from a linguistic point of view. The corpus serves
as a record of language in use by agroup of speakers. Thus, when we question a corpus about
speaker preferences, we obtain a more reliable answer than if we ask the speakers themselves.

1
He is a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Program in Letters at PUCRS. This work has been sponsored
by CNPq.

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 In the chapter on conventionalities, the author explains that the most frequently used
clusters area sort of agreement (not made previously) between speakers of a particular language
community. See one of the tables proposed by Tagnin (2013).

Table 1 – Adjective collocations which are different in English and Portuguese

Colocações Adjetivas
Hard luck Má sorte
Outside chance Hipótese remota
Spare parts Partes sobressalentes
Up right piano Piano de armário
Public Television Televisão educativa
Source: Tagnin (2013)
Without further explanation, the author mentions the word ‘blithering’ that occurs
mainly with the noun idiot and fool. The equivalent in Portuguese would be coroca, which is
usually accompanied by the word velha. It is hard to find another word that goes together with
coroca in Portuguese. However, the author argues that the words prescription and wand are
usually accompanied by fill and magic, when we know we can also use write out a prescription.
Importantly,the author points out some comments regarding the nature of syntax and
how conventionality affects it: we may have confusing sentences when it comes to grammar,
however, acceptable for speakers of any socio-cultural level, for instance by and large in
English and de vez em quando in Portuguese.
Perini (2009) believes that there are forces competing in languages: an internal force,
immanent inside the system, and an external one, which is outside. Thus, the principle of
arbitrariness of the linguistic sign is reconsidered, as it is accepted that there is a relationship
between language and external reality, and that certain pragmatic functions can influence the
grammaticalization process. Givón(2001), on the other hand, assumes the grammaticalization
process or syntaxation comes from the functionality in levels out of the syntax.
On the semantic level, the author argues that there is a direct relationship between
words and their meaning, which belongs to agreement inside the language, and not motivated at
all. Tagnin (2013) reflects on this matter, considering that meanings and images are directly
associated.
We also recall that for Lakoff (2002), metaphors permeate the language, because in
Western culture, for instance, everything that is upis considered good; everything that is down is
considered bad. The examples in Portuguese and English can be found in Table 2 below:

Table 2 – Ups e Downs& in Western cultures

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 Baixo Cima Down Up
Baixo astral Alto astral I’m feeling down Thumbsup
Caiu da cama Cabeça erguida You’re falling to Thismovieis top
pieces
Ele vive na fossa Levante o ânimo He’s in a low spirit Chin up
today
Source: Tagnin (2013) e Lakoff (2002)
But we must not forget that this rule is not consensual. Some phrasal verbs with the
preposition down appear to have a neutral meaning, as intake it down on a piece of paper, which
means to make a note.
Based on the interpretation by Tagnin (2013), one can make a visual scheme to illustrate
the levels of conventionality, which covers much of her view on the subject developed in the
book. See Table 3 below:
Table 3 – Visual overview of conventionality

Pragmatic Situation
Verbal Expression
Semantic Meaningoftheform
Conventionality Meaningoftheimage
Syntatic Grammaticality
Order
Word choice

After a brief summary of the theoretical framework, Tagnin (2013) addresses her
methodology, which expands upon what was mentioned in the first five chapters of her work,
which has a strong emphasis on corpus linguistics.
We can see that Tagnin (2013) strongly emphasizes that the use of specialized corpora
in Brazilian Portuguese has had a significant role in improving the quality of the translations by
her students in class, when it comes to the correct choice of the term and idiomatic aspects of
writing. If we understand "correct choice of a term/word" as a collocation and "idiomatic
writing" as natural language, we realize that these two aspects are the pillars of what we call
"conventionality (or phraseology) in the language" in which the lack of knowledge characterizes
the naïve speaker.
The issue of the naïve speaker permeates the book; he is defined as someone who is not
aware of the language conventions. For instance, according to Fillmore (1979), he would not
know that a prisoner and a jailer are two different things. Why should they be different? After
all, both are formed by the base prison and jail which means "a building where wrong-doers are
locked up", plus a more agentive suffix-er. How do we explain, then, that a prisoner is “the
person kept in the prison” while a jailer is "the person in charge of the jail"?

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 At the end ofthe work, Tagnin (2013) talks about other important aspects, including
situational formulas, which are the conversations that we maintain on a daily basis, following
patterns established in society that make our everyday speech a kind of cliché: pre-shaped
patterns of thought that can be always developed. According tothe author, speakers can predict
what will be said in a dialogue even before it is delivered given our previous knowledge of
previously made clusters. An example in Portuguese:

-Você acabou de ganhar um presente da titia filinho, como é que a gente diz?2
-Obrigado, tia!3

In English, the polite form ‘May I’ is an example, but Tagnin (2013) also points out that
collocations and formulas are the categories that present the greatest difficulty. When we are
talking about collocations -words that co-occur more frequently than if they were randomly
combined- the difficulty may lie in the fact that they are understood most of the time, so they
tend to go unnoticed. In other words, most of them are compositional; collocations are easy to
understand. However, when it comes to production, they are not easily found in the memory,
since there is no conscious effort to memorize them. A dictionary itself could never solve all the
problems a translator can have in terms of conventionality. It is true that there are some
reference books that address these categories, especially monolingual and bilingual dictionaries
of idioms.
At the end of the book, the author provides us with a generous glossary with translations
in German, French, English and Spanish, of some topics (collocations, clusters) covered in the
reading. In addition, there is a commented bibliography used in the work.

About the reviewer:

Rafael Peixoto holds a degree in English and Portuguese Studies with teaching degree from
PUCRS. He has recently completed a certificate course in Translation Studies and he is
currently completing his master’s degree, at the same university. The reviewer has been
working with TESOL and FLE for over 8 years. As a graduate and postgraduate student, he has
conducted many studies in pragmatics, syntax and prepositions.

References
Sardinha, Tony Berber. 2004. Linguística de Corpus. São Paulo: Manole.
O’Keeffe, Anne. 2011. Introducing Pragmatics in Use. Abingdon: Routledge.
Perini, Mário Alberto. 2009. Gramática Descritiva do Português. 4 ed. São Paulo: Ática.

2
Translation: You have just received a present from your auntie, what do you say?
3
Thank you, Aunt.

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Givón, Talmy (2001). Syntax: An Introduction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lakoff, George (2002). Metáforas da Vida Cotidiana. Campinas: Mercado das Letras.
Fillmore, Charles (1979). Innocence: A Second Idealization for Linguistics. Berkeley:
Linguistics Society.

Date received: 16/12/2014

Date revised: 19/12/2014
Date accepted: 29/12/2014

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