films

[Beverly Flanigan]

At 02:39 PM 9/6/2002 -0400, you wrote:

>Perhaps Yoda in Star Wars could be used to introduce students to VSO
>languages.
>
>--Steve Pinker

My grad student TAs often use Yoda scenes in their Syntax unit.  Students
don't seem to notice that after a while Yoda drops his peculiar syntax and
switches to SVO, particularly in complex sentences (I suspect the
scriptwriter lost track of the "rules").