Universal Dependencies in a galaxy far, far away... What makes Yoda’s English truly alien

This paper investigates the word order used by Yoda, a character from the Star Wars universe. His clauses typically contain an Object, Oblique and/or non-finite part of the predicate followed by the subject and the finite predicate/auxiliary/copula, e.g. Help you it will. Using the sentences in Yodish from the scripts of the Star War films, this paper examines three crosslinguistically common tendencies, which can be explained by optimization of processing: the trade-off between entropy of S and O order and morphological cues, minimization of dependency lengths, and the tendency to place the verb in the end of a clause. For comparison, a standardized version of Yoda’s sentences is used, as well as the Universal Dependencies corpora. The results of quantitative analyses indicate that Yodish is less adjusted to human processor’s needs than standard English and other human languages.