Frozen
In this popular Disney movie, Anna confronts Queen Elsa with the question: “What are you so afraid of?”
You probably wonder, isn’t it incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition? Not at all, say the linguists.
“Anna’s line is perfectly acceptable because it’s generated by the mental grammar of English speakers,” says Raffaella Zanuttini, PhD, Professor of Linguistics at Yale University.
“Mental grammar,” she explains, is our set of internal rules that guide what sounds right to us—but it often gets trumped by the “prescriptive grammar” forced on us by English teachers. Dr. Adams completely agrees.
“Not ending a sentence with a preposition is an 18th-century crazy rule,” he says.
