Porque o livro é foda. Difícil escolher um só trecho pra botar aqui; meu livro tá todo recheado de marcadores post-it. Quem tiver paciência que leia e se deleite.

…

By analogy, the “authorities” ruled that prepositions shouldn’t end sentences in English either. Since that time, generations of children have been drilled on this rule, with little effect except in their formal writing. And ending sentences with prepositions is still very much alive in English.

Such proscriptive teaching of grammar, which evidently doesn’t work very well, contrasts strikingly with aspects of English sentence patterns that probably nobody has ever thought to teach. Here’s an example. Look at the four sentences in (1).

(1)
a Joan appeared to Moira to like herself.
b Joan appeared to Moira to like her.
c Joan appealed to Moira to like herself.
d Joan appealed to Moira to like her.

Without thinking about it consciously, you have automatically inferred that each of these sentences has a different combination of who is to like whom. (…)

How do we come to understand these sentences this way? It obviously depends somehow on the difference between ordinary pronouns such as “her” and reflexive pronouns such as “herself”, and also on the difference between the verbs “appear” and “appeal”. But how? Whatever reasons there may be, I’m sure no one is ever taught about contrasts like this by their parents or teachers or anyone else. Yet this aspect of English grammatical patterns is deeply ingrained, much more so than the taught prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition.

I can’t resist another example, because it’s so striking. There is an alteration called “expletive infixation” that many speakers perform on words of English under conditions of extreme exasperation, as in (2).

(2)
How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not talking about the Allegheny River! Can’t you get it into your stupid head that I’m talking about the Susque-goddam-hanna?

Even if you’re too refined ever to use an expression like this, I’m sure you recognize it. Now the interesting thing is that we have pretty clear intuitions about how to use this infix. It sounds natural in the examples in (3), but decidedly odd in those in (4).

(3)
uni-goddam-versity
manu-fuckin-facturer

(4)
Jacken-bloody-doff
ele-goddam-phant

(…)

I’m fairly certain none of us was ever taught the principle (or pattern) that says where it is possible to insert an expletive infix into English words. Yet we readily use this prniciple to make intuitive judgmenets about new cases. At the same time, the principle is not so obvious to conscious introspection.

(…)

Since adults aren’t consciously aware of the principles of mental grammar (and the examples just presented provide further illustration), they certainly can’t explain these principles to children – if children could understand the explanations in any event!

In fact, the most an adult can do is supply the child with examples of the patterns, in the form of grammatical sentences, or corrections to the child’s sentences. For instance, notice that in the dialogue I quoted above, the mother isn’t saying “‘Nobody’ and ‘not’ are both negative words, and you shouldn’t use two negatives in a sentence.” She is just supplying the child with a correct form. This means that the child has to figure out the patterns of the language – that is, the child has to construct his or her own mental grammar.

(…)

Where does that leave the learning of language? On the basis of what the child hears in the environment, and in the (near-) absence of teaching and of conscius awareness of what is being learned, the child manages to acquire a command of the grammatical patterns of the language – that is, manages to construct a mental grammar. This isn’t the way we’re accustomed to thinking of language learning. We usually think of it in terms of something like French class in school, a highly structured situation in which the teacher and learner bring a lot of conscious attention to bear on rules and regulations. The child’s learning of grammatical structure just doesn’t seem to be like that. The child learns by speaking and being spoken to.

(…)

A suggestive parallel to the unconscious learning of language might be the process of learning to skip, which requires complicated patterns of muscle coordination. It’s impossible to describe to a child how to do it; the best we can do is demonstrate. And when the child figures out how to skip, it will be impossible to get him or her to explain it. Rather, the process of constructing the patterns takes place outside of consciousness; the major part of the learning is experienced as “just intuitive”.

Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature – Ray Jackendoff