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Dropping the act (lemmy.world)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/starwarsmemes@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 7 months ago* (1 child)

No, that's all very interesting. I knew my arguments weren't seaworthy, I just wanted to provoke a linguist to further exposition. And it worked!

The only bone I'll pick:

"Ich werde den Apfel essen."

We see that "den Apfel" does in fact take the accusative, which means that "essen" is not acting as the direct object of the sentence.

Yes, but I was viewing the whole phrase "den Apfel essen" as the DO. So "den Apfel" taking the accusative was really my point. I guess I was viewing the complement structure as one cohesive phrase, as you pointed out.

And I may have used the term 'predicate' wrong. I was under the impression that it's just the verb attached to the subject, so thanks for clearing that up.

But my point stands that the modal "werden" gets conjugated as the main verb (the one attached to the subject, whatever the correct word for that is), while "essen" gets changed back to the infinitive and moves to the end of the sentence to get attached to the DO.

That's where I was coming at it from, but I apparently didn't use the correct terminology. So that's my bad.

Also, sorry for the delayed response. It took a while for my brain to process it and decide what to say. Thanks for the intellectual stimulation!

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

    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!

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