Yoda’s Speech and Present Progressive

Yamamoto Akiho

doi:10.24628/yeiwa.22.0_13

Unlike generative grammar, which assumes underlying basis of all languages that is unique to human beings, cognitive linguistics assumes that languages have their basis in general cognitive functions and suggests that syntax and semantics influence each other. If the assumption of cognitive linguistics is correct, then ungrammatical sentences we may make or sentences that are not commonly used but can be understood easily may also reflect the influence of such underlying cognitive functions. Based on this idea, this paper examines the language of an extraterrestrial character called Yoda in Star Wars series, who often inverts words in his speech. The results show that although the basic units of such inversions are a phrase or phrases, rather than a word alone, verb phrases were exceptional, in which a verb and an auxiliary verb are often split by changing the word order. Similar inversions can be found in subject-auxiliary inversions of questions, for example, but Yoda prefers moving a verb forward to moving an auxiliary verb. The fact that audience of this movie series can understand Yoda despite his unusual way of speech infers that the word correlations in verb phrases are weaker than those in other phrases.

Yoda’s Speech and Present Progressive

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