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

**Authors:** Natalia Levshina · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W19-8005](https://aclanthology.org/W19-8005/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**1** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2995858208) openalex · 2026-10-18[**1** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/ud-2019-levshina-universal-dependencies-galaxy-far-far/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W19-80/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W19-8005/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W19-8005.pdf)
- [DOI 10.18653/v1/w19-8005](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-8005)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2995858208)

**Authors (1)**

1. [Levshina, Natalia](https://openalex.org/A5041808868) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3669-8784) · h 22 · 2423 citations · 160 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-18); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

Levshina takes about 2,000 words of dialogue from five Star Wars films, annotates them in UD, and normalizes them to standard English word order, in order to test three efficiency tendencies from typology. The tendencies are the link between rigid word order and poor morphology, the minimization of dependency lengths, and the late placement of the verb. The character's order puts a non-finite predicate, object or oblique first, then the subject, then the finite verb or auxiliary. The subject-object order entropy is high in every film (0.76 to 0.99, 0.96 overall), where English is near zero. Dependency lengths are longer than in the normalized version, significantly so in Episode III (mean 2.24 against 1.94), and the cause is mostly auxiliaries and copulas separated from their predicates. The paper concludes that this variety is less efficient than English but still works as a stylistic device.

## Ideas

- I1. `en/src/lin.rs`: build a word-order stress test from EWT dev by fronting an object or oblique and moving the finite verb or auxiliary to the end (a construction, not the film lines), and measure the LAS drop of `en parse-eval` on it.
- I2. Compute subject-object order entropy per treebank in `en ud-eval`, and compare the EWT dev value with the orders that `lin.rs` generates; the generator should not produce more order freedom than the treebank has.
- I3. Use the mean dependency length as a score for `lin.rs`: compare the generated orders with the treebank mean, using the paper's 2.24 against 1.94 as the scale of the difference.
- I4. In `prag`, check that the link from an auxiliary to its subject and lexical verb survives into the event frames when the auxiliary comes last, which is the case the paper says causes the longer dependencies.

## For Mova

The word-order generator `en/src/lin.rs` and the order statistics are the components that the paper speaks to most directly. The ideas touch [29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/29-ellipsis-word-order-information-structure/), `21-clause-structure.md` and `26-questions.md` (auxiliary inversion). The film scripts are copyrighted and are not to be used; only the construction and the measures carry over.

Topics: [Universal Dependencies](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/universal-dependencies/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.18653/v1/w19-8005](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-8005)

```
@inproceedings{levshina2019universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies in a galaxy far, far away... What makes Yoda's English truly alien}},
  author = {Levshina, Natalia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019)},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w19-8005},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-8005}
}
```

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## References

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