Tuesday, May 17, 2005
On Language 5/17: Yoda’s Grammar
Out of this world Yoda’s syntax always has been
Chicago Tribune, May 17, 2005
By Nathan Bierma
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This week’s final installment of the “Star Wars” franchise is not only the end of a cinematic era. The completion of George Lucas’ second trilogy will be the last hurrah for one of the most grammatically eclectic film characters of all time: Yoda. ...
Yoda is a syntactical switch-hitter, alternating among object-initial sentences (“Rootleaf I cook”), subject-initial sentences (“A Jedi’s strength flows from the Force”), and sentence fragments (“No different! Only different in your mind.”)
Sometimes you will hear Yoda start a sentence with the kind of adjective that grammar textbooks call a subject complement, as in “Strong is Vader,” or he will separate helping verbs from main verbs, as in “Help you I can.”
Here’s Geoff Pullum‘s extended analysis of “Help you I can,” which is not for the grammatically faint of heart (much less a newspaper):
(Update: Pullum’s more formal follow-up is at LL. In another e-mail, he clarifies that in “I can help you,” “can” is actually the main verb and “help” is ‘“a nonfinite verb heading a catenative complement.” Got that?)
(Update 2: I commented on this article for Chicago Public Radio—see the 5th segment.)
“Help you I can” can be looked at in two ways. First, this is the
order we would expect in a hard-line OSV language, because it has
the complement of the tensed verb at the front of the clause. We
would expect this in a real OSV language (call it XSV, where X is
whatever the V needs grammatically):X S V Translation
This I like. “I like this.”
A fool you are. “You are a fool.”
Angry we felt. “We felt angry.”
Help you I can. “I can help you.”But the second way you could look at it is as an unusually extended
case of something that also happens in English: almost any complement
is kicked to the front of the whole sentence for purposes having to do
with contrastive focus:This, I imagine most people are going to complain about __.
Convinced, I would say that basically I wasn’t __ at first.
Love you, I certainly will __, though perhaps not forever.
?Help you, I can __; waive the penalty, I cannot __.Doesn’t sound perfect, that last one, but you see what I mean. And
in short sentences, with no finite subordinate clauses, you can’t
really tell the difference between XSV order in the clause and SVX
order with some (possibly embedded) constituent fronted.> I don’t know if they’ll let me use the word “modal” in the newspaper but how unusual/intriguing is this syntax?
It’s not about modals. It’s about ANY auxiliary verb, especially
the verb “do”. You get this sort of thing:They wanted him to demolish it, and demolish it he did __.
You said rewrite it, and rewritten it I have __.
I thought he’d be pretty angry, and angry he certainly was __.So you can see Yoda as just placing greater stress on a sentence
pattern that English also allows. That might actually be a better
account of what he favors: Complement + Subject + Auxiliary.
One English teacher wrote to suggest Shakespearean influence on Yoda:
As an English teacher and Star Wars fan I’ve always guessed that Shakespeare more than a little Yoda’s syntax did influence. Lucas is a great fan of classic literature and mythology. This could be Yoda instead of Othello: “This handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give.” Anyway, you’ll probably get a few hundred emails from English teachers. We spend several weeks a year teaching Shakespearean syntax just so our students can read great stuff like Hamlet—or at least understand Yoda.
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