Yodaspeak: A Study In Yoda's Speaking Patterns and Their Frequency in the Star Wars Movies — Page 2

doubleofive said:

 

Anchorhead said:

captainsolo said:

Just another example of the prequels trying way too hard

This

Do you even know who "Yoda" is? ;-)

 

lol

doubleofive said:

 

Anchorhead said:

captainsolo said:

Just another example of the prequels trying way too hard

This

Do you even know who "Yoda" is? ;-)

 

Boom. Roasted.

Hey guys.

I'll get to work on this as soon as I can and get back to you with some answers. From a preliminary look at the discussion so far, I might need a bit more information. Divorcing a statement from its context might lead to some incorrect conclusions on my part -- for example, "a prophecy that misread may have been", if a standalone statement, is ungrammatical in any syntax on earth, but if it is a response to someone talking about a prophecy, then it could very well be a noun phrase and not a complete sentence. That would make it unusual, but still grammatical in a verb-final type of language (like Korean or Japanese).

I may have to return with some questions to the wise people of these forums as far as sentences where the wider dialog may be needed. I've seen the movies myself a number of times, but my recollection is not so good on these specific data. =)

Regards,

Tim, doublofive's roommate and resident linguist

Okay, there's more data than I thought. =)

I've been through the Empire quotes, and have developed some hypotheses. I'll share what I have with you guys now, and see how the data matches up with what I have so far.

Current hypothesis: Yoda is a non-native speaker of English. He frequently makes errors natural for NNSoE. Often he inverts his word order to OSV, which, while VERY uncommon in the languages of Earth, is possible. It is almost universally dispreferred to put O before S, but some very few languages in South America do it, and marked forms of some other languages (like Mandarin) do it. Presumably, Yoda's native tongue (is there a name for this yet? If not, I may call it "Yodish", or perhaps "Dagobarista") has an OSV word order, and he is accidentally code-switching.

 Perhaps in the prequels he has worse English because in between the trilogies he attended an ESL class. It does stand to reason that his English would improve given time, although in 900 years he should have probably been indistinguishable from a native speaker.

 Some places where Yoda makes frequent errors:

Temporal adverbs—are placed sentence-initial, sentence-medial, sentence final, and in their proper place.

Auxiliary verbs – Placed inconsistently or left out (especially with “do”)

Negatives placed word finally  -- this is okay in archaic English, as in “size matters not”

Equative clauses are almost always structured OVS (with O being the predicate complement)

Possible hypothesis for future study -- Is Yoda employing topic and focus (as per Halliday, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topic%E2%80%93comment for a primer)

Next time, I'll tackle ROTJ and see if Yoda is consistent in his diction across movies in the same trilogy. Thirdly, we can take a look at the prequels and see what's changed, and perhaps amend our guesses.

Regards,

Tim

Doubleofive's Roommate said:

Worst.  Username.  Ever.

;-)

As much as I like Clone Wars, their Yoda dialog violations seem like the worst of them all. I can't remember ever hearing a normal sentence from him.

Okay, I've been through all the movies minus RotS, and I've found two interesting linguistic deviations between Original Trilogy Yoda and Prequel Yoda.

The first: OT Yoda uses OVS construction in equative clauses. This means he says the Object (or the complement in this case) first, then the Verb, then the Subject in sentences where the main verb is "be". This is acceptable, and even euphonious, to speakers of American English, because it follows rules accepted in an older English style. Take these examples:

"Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter."

"Always in motion is the future."

"Strong is Vader."

"Anger...fear...aggression. The dark side of the Force are they."

"Strong am I with the Force... but not that strong!"

In these examples, and in fact in the entire OT corpus, 100% of equative clause sentences carried an OVS construction.

Now, lets look at the second set of data (the prequels)

"Hard to see, the dark side is."

"Revealed your opinion is."

"Clouded this boy's future is."

"The chosen one the boy may be."

"But for certain, Senator, in grave danger you are."

"Truly wonderful the mind of a child is."

Notice that in every instance, 100% of equative clauses are OSV, not OVS. This is representative of the entire corpus. This means that every one is verb final, which is much more unusual and uncommon in standard English antiquated or otherwise, and generally has a more foreign, "incorrect" sound to them. At the very least, the speech pattern is markedly and wildly different from the original movies.

Interesting, wot? My next post will point out perhaps an even more grave error concerning Yoda's differing speech patterns.

Regards,

Tim

Sorry for the hiatus -- I've been quite busy moving from Texas to Illinois in preparation for my daughter's cleft palate repair (which is happening May 2nd, prayers are welcome). 

I wanted to finish what I started and supply you with the second issue of Yoda's differing speech patterns in the trilogies, which produced some of the most awkward lines delivered by Yoda. Consider this offensive datum:

"Confer on you the level of Jedi knight the council does, but agree with your taking this boy as your Padawan learner I do not."

Even in text I found this line hard to process, because this line exhibits two things that English hates: verb fronting and cleft constructions. One is rare: the other is simply ungrammatical. 

Verb fronting is exactly that: the verb is placed in the initial position in the sentence. Japanese does it; really, a bunch of languages do. Even English might have this construction in some interrogative statements (which I excluded from this study, because of this exact fact). For English, though, it's a little harder to do because of the auxiliary verbs. Verbs like be, do, have and will have a special function of defining tense or aspect for the matrix verb in many sentences, and splitting a verb from its auxiliary creates a cleft construction, which in English is a big no-no. The further the cleft, the more odd it sounds.

Unfortunately, when I examined the OT and the NT more closely, I could find little difference in the mechanics of these constructions, when it occurred. The differences were in how egregiously the verb was split from its auxiliary, and the frequency in which Yoda uses it. in the OT, Yoda may say things like:

Told you, I did.

Stay and help you, I will.

Take you to him, I will.

...suffer your father's fate, you will.

These four examples are all of the non-interrogative data I could find exhibiting the verb fronting with cleft construction. In the prequels, he uses this construction much more:

Confer on you the level of Jedi knight the council does, but agree with your taking this boy as your Padawan learner I do not.

...find Obi-Wan's wayward planet we will.

Allow this appointment lightly the council does not.

Hiding in the Outer Rim Grievous is.

Heard from no one have we.

Received a coded retreat message we have.

With many more examples not listed. Notice how, in each of the examples, the auxiliaries are as far away as possible from the main verbs (not in this case can be viewed as an auxiliary also, because it is part of the verb phrase).

So there isn't a huge, qualitative difference between the trilogies in this case as there was with the OSV vs. OVS constructions in equative clauses mentioned earlier. But, the frequency in which this construction is applied (35/150 23% of all lines vs. 4/131  3% of all lines) and how far away the verb is from its auxiliary in some particularly heinous sentences forces me to conclude that this is another major difference in speech pattern between trilogies.

If you take into account that Yoda was feigning...something in the early parts of his relationship with Luke on Dagobah, the number in the OT is cut to 1 out of 131, with that one being an unclear example because it is an embedded sentence -- the whole sentence, "Do not underestimate the powers of the Emperor, or suffer your father's fate you will." does not exhibit the same construction. So, with some minor manipulation of the data you could say that this mode of speech is standard for Yoda only in the prequels.

That was a lot of information, and perhaps more jargon than anyone needed, but I hope it was helpful in some way. I know I enjoyed the study. 

Regards,

Tim

I can only assume x-man was going for "absolutely nothing."

Anchorhead said:

Doubleofive's Roommate said:

 

... or perhaps "Dagobarista"

Nice!