• hakase@lemmy.zipEnglish
    61·
    3 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.

      • hakase@lemmy.zipEnglish
        6·
        2 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. :)

  • atomicbocks@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    13·
    3 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.