I see what you mean, and to try to make it a bit clearer what I mean I’ll show you why English syntax and German syntax are considered very similar by syntactic standards, even though German modals/auxiliaries are all the way at the end of the sentence.
The answer relies on the assumption that German and English (and all of the world’s languages’, for that matter) syntax show basically the same structural hierarchy, regardless of how different their word orders are. I won’t get into the reasons for that assumption, because it would take us half of an introductory syntax course to do so, but I will show you the (slightly oversimplified) result.
Note that regardless of the order of the words, the hierarchy of phrases stays the same between both languages. The idea is that the English and German sentences really have this same hierarchy, but that whether each node branches right or left determines the word order, which matters less than it seems to.
So, instead of older Germanic languages having to transition from a German-style syntax to an English-style one by moving seemingly random words to seemingly random places, all they have to do is make a different binary choice at a few of the nodes in the tree, and the English sentences build themselves. This approach has a ton of other benefits that we don’t have anywhere near enough time to get into, but one in particular is useful for the Yoda sentences, in that in all cases you can elegantly determine what Yoda will move to the front of the sentence by cutting off the “Verb Phrase” node and everything that it dominates (that is, everything below it in the tree). So, for “Look as good, you will not”, we have:
Cut off everything VP and below and move it to the front and we get “Look as good, you will not”. This is the exact process that can generate all of the dialogue mentioned in the comment above - draw the tree, cut off VP and everything below it, move it to the front, and you have Yoda-fronting.
Cheers for a fun convo - it’s always great to get to talk about linguistics!
I see what you mean, and to try to make it a bit clearer what I mean I’ll show you why English syntax and German syntax are considered very similar by syntactic standards, even though German modals/auxiliaries are all the way at the end of the sentence.
The answer relies on the assumption that German and English (and all of the world’s languages’, for that matter) syntax show basically the same structural hierarchy, regardless of how different their word orders are. I won’t get into the reasons for that assumption, because it would take us half of an introductory syntax course to do so, but I will show you the (slightly oversimplified) result.
Note that regardless of the order of the words, the hierarchy of phrases stays the same between both languages. The idea is that the English and German sentences really have this same hierarchy, but that whether each node branches right or left determines the word order, which matters less than it seems to.
So, instead of older Germanic languages having to transition from a German-style syntax to an English-style one by moving seemingly random words to seemingly random places, all they have to do is make a different binary choice at a few of the nodes in the tree, and the English sentences build themselves. This approach has a ton of other benefits that we don’t have anywhere near enough time to get into, but one in particular is useful for the Yoda sentences, in that in all cases you can elegantly determine what Yoda will move to the front of the sentence by cutting off the “Verb Phrase” node and everything that it dominates (that is, everything below it in the tree). So, for “Look as good, you will not”, we have:
Cut off everything VP and below and move it to the front and we get “Look as good, you will not”. This is the exact process that can generate all of the dialogue mentioned in the comment above - draw the tree, cut off VP and everything below it, move it to the front, and you have Yoda-fronting.
Cheers for a fun convo - it’s always great to get to talk about linguistics!