• hzl@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    12·
    7 hours ago

    It’s interesting how flanderized Yoda became. Like, when we first saw this guy he was just a silly little goblin living in a swamp, but then he just never acts like that again. It totally makes sense that he would be acting unsuspicious to avoid drawing imperial attention, but it’s surprising that we don’t really ever see this again.

    On the other hand, maybe it’s something he learned from Darth Jarjar.

  • hakase@lemmy.zipEnglish
    129·
    19 hours ago

    This grammatical line and the completely nonsensical line “Around the survivors, a perimeter, create” can both be explained by the fact that these are both imperative (command) sentences, and that doesn’t work for the syntax they tried to give Yoda in the prequels.

    In the OT, Yoda’s syntax (word order/sentence structure) was all over the place, with varying degrees of grammaticality, but in the prequels for some reason they decided to standardize his nonstandardness to “move the main verb and anything that follows to the beginning of the sentence, adding ‘do/does’ if necessary” (VP-fronting with dummy-do support where necessary, in linguistic terms). This is at least marginally grammatical for most speakers, but heavily marked, making this way of speaking stand out.

    In the vast majority of English sentences, this leaves the subject and any modals/auxiliaries (“helping verbs”) stranded at the end of the sentence. Give (most of) Yoda’s (prequel) sentences their idiosyncratic flair, this does.

    Imperatives in English, however, are characterized by the fact that they have implicit (unstated) subjects and no modals/auxiliaries. This means that there’s no way to tell if the VP has been fronted, because the verb would occur at the beginning of the sentence anyway.

    There are a few ways to fix this: 1) Just have Yoda say the sentence normally, as happened here, 2) Come up with something that is completely ungrammatical in English, as in the second example above, or 3) Never have Yoda use an imperative, and instead only have him use exhortative constructions like “We must…”, which they often do throughout the prequels.

    Basically, because of how they standardized Yoda’s syntax in the prequels, there is effectively no way of getting a true imperative in English that both a) shows a nonstandard word order and b) is not complete word salad.

    Source: I wrote a paper on Yoda’s syntax in grad school.

    • wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      6·
      6 hours ago

      This doesn’t address the prepositional phrases.

      From the OT: “When 900 years old you reach, look as good, you will not!” has a similar syntactic structure to “Around the survivors, a perimeter, create.”

      True one’s a future tense, and one’s an imperative. But they both begin with the prepositional phrase, have the direct object in the middle, and end with the subject-predicate pair (assuming the imperative implies the subject within itself, i.e. “You, create.” And considering the negation as being attached to the verb, i.e. “will not”)

      You might say “but the verb is ‘to look as good’, and ‘will’ is the tense modifier,” but if you’re familiar with any germanic language outside of English you’ll understand that grammatically “will” as a modal verb gets treated as the predicate, and “look as good” gets treated as the object to which it applies.

      Of course, this doesn’t explain “Concentrate all your fire on the nearest starship.” I guess Yoda was just caught up in the moment…

      • hakase@lemmy.zipEnglish
        21·
        17 hours ago

        It was just an introductory syntax class paper, so definitely not that interesting theoretically. It started with an exploration of the data, showing that Yoda in the OT uses both significantly more “normal” sentences, and also significantly more varied word order patterns than in the PT, and then proceeded to the (generative, pre-Minimalist) syntactic analysis of the PT syntax (since that was the only data that was sensically analyzable).

        That analysis was straightforward, and effectively what I’ve written here: VP-fronting, leaving TP/IP, NegP, and any AuxP stranded, and inserting and inflecting “do” when necessary so that the phi-features in T/I are expressed.

        The paper concluded with some interesting/weird data and edge cases, such as the difficulty of creating imperatives in this system, and the oddness of questions for much the same reason as the imperatives (“More to say, have you?”, “Trained as a Jedi, you request for him?”).

        Like I said, not too interesting theoretically, but a fun paper for a first-year grad student to write. :)

        • wizzor@sopuli.xyzEnglish
          6·
          15 hours ago

          I don’t know what the most prestigious journal is in linguistics is (and I eill be disappointed if it is not called The Tongue), but I feel this paper deserves to be there.

          Edit: apparently they are called: Linguistics Syntax and Journal of Linguistics

          Imaginative bunch, this is.

          • hakase@lemmy.zipEnglish
            6·
            14 hours ago

            The most prestigious journals for general theoretical linguistics are probably Language, Linguistic Inquiry, and maybe Glossa after the editorial pushback against Lingua about a decade ago for its opposition to open research availability (so you’re right that linguists often name their more prestigious journals after words for “tongue”!)

            Either way, my first year paper’s analysis would be immediately obvious to any syntactician, and definitely doesn’t belong in a journal.

            I appreciate the compliment though. :)

  • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    19·
    19 hours ago

    Right up until they showed him talking a little weird in the prequels I’d always assumed it was meant to be an eccentricity brought on by living alone for decades.