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.
From the moment Yoda first
appeared in "The Empire Strikes Back" in 1980 -- assuring Luke Skywalker, "Help
you I can," and warning him, "If once you start down the dark path ... consume
you it will" --Yoda caught our attention with his unique syntax, or system of
word order.
Geoffrey Pullum, linguist
and co-author of the "Cambridge Grammar of the English Language" (Cambridge
University Press, $160), can explain Yoda's strange way of speaking. His
analysis may bring back some bad blackboard memories, but it goes to show that
anyone can learn grammar with Yoda as teacher.
Take a look at this Yoda
sentence from "Empire Strikes Back": "Through the Force, things you will
see."
To hear Pullum tell it, this sentence is a galactic grammatical
feat. That's because it places the object of the sentence ("things") before the
subject ("you"). In English and many other languages, the more natural word
order would be, "You will see things."
On the lookout
Even before
Yoda arrived on the silver screen, Pullum was keeping an eye out for this kind
of sentence structure -- which linguists call "object-initial" clauses -- in
human languages.
"Until 1977, I would have said that no human language
used that as the typical order of constituents in an ordinary, unembellished
clause with no special emphasis effects. In fact I did say so, in print in
1976," Pullum writes by e-mail.
Later in the decade, Pullum discovered
some obscure languages in South America that appeared to regularly use
object-initial clauses, but those languages are exceptions. So whether he
realized it or not, George Lucas stumbled upon a grammatical stroke of genius
with Yoda's word order.
"The one thing you could do to make your syntax
seem quite strange to almost all the six billion people on this planet, no
matter which of the 6,000 languages they spoke, would be to adopt
[object-initial] order as the normal order of declarative clauses," Pullum
said.
Yoda is actually 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 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."
"English allows this possibility but doesn't use it
very often," Pullum says. "Yoda uses it at the drop of a hat."
When
English speakers use this inverted word order, it's usually for special emphasis
or rhetorical effect. They might say, "One thing I know ..." instead of "I know
one thing" or "Here I am" instead of "I am here." So Yoda's syntax could be a
way to make him sound sophisticated, as well as extraterrestrial, says Mark
Peters, who writes about language for Verbatim and The Vocabula Review and keeps
a Weblog on words www.wordlust.blogspot.com).
`Musical chairs'
"In
addition to making him sound like Kermit the Frog crossed with a fortune cookie,
these Yodaisms mirror how Luke's world is being turned upside down (at times,
literally, with the help of Jedi levitation)," Peters writes by e-mail. "If a
green Muppet living in a swamp can be as smart and powerful as Yoda, and a mass
murderer like Darth Vader can be Luke's (eventually) redeemable daddy, then
maybe subjects, verbs and objects can play musical chairs too."
Peters
adds that Yoda's name is itself notable to word watchers. He says "Yoda" is
entering English as, in his words, "a synonym for teacher, mentor, and
all-around ... wise person."
"On `Buffy the Vampire Slayer,' Spike the
Vampire says of older vampire Angel, `You were my Yoda!'" Peters
says.
"I've complimented several excellent teachers I've known by calling
them `my Yoda' too, and I don't think Spike and I are the only ones. I predict
more dictionaries will get with it and include `Yoda' in the
future."
