Hard to See, the Dark Side Is

Syntactic Anomalies Applied to a Selection of Parsing Models illustrated by the Speech of Master Yoda

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,7, University of Leipzig (Insitut für Anglistik), course: Psycholinguistics, language: English, abstract: 'Clear your mind must be, if you are to discover the real villains behind this plot.' If Star Wars is an important step in the history of film, Master Yoda's way of speaking is one in the establishment of linguistic awareness beyond linguistic circles. His way of speaking has become a cult over the years and his quotations are widely known, not only among Star Wars fans. Even somebody who has not seen any of the six episodes (so did the author of this paper) is very likely to know to whom sentences like the above-mentioned quotation refer. This is due to the fact that Master Yoda, to whom the sentence can be attributed, has a very unique way of speaking; the syntactic structure underlying his utterances is of a high recognition value.