This is gonna be a long one, but there’s a lot in your comment to unpack.
Note that I specifically excluded the OT from my analysis because it doesn’t show the same systematic syntax that the PT does. But, the core clausal structure of the “900 years” line also perfectly follows my analysis, so I feel comfortable commenting on it here.
First, the “prepositional phrase” (it’s actually a conditional clause acting as an adjunct, not a prepositional phrase) doesn’t really need to be addressed, because sentential adjuncts in English can be positioned relatively freely.
For example: “When I go to the store, I will buy bread”, “I, when I go to the store, will buy bread”, “I will, when I go to the store, buy bread”, and “I will buy bread when I go to the store” are all fine, with perhaps slightly different pragmatic contexts that license them.
This means that adjunct clauses like “when 900 years you reach” (which itself does not follow the usual PT convention, which would be “when reach 900 years you do”) are not very useful for determining main clause sentence structure, and should mostly be ignored in analyses like these except in special cases where it actually has something to say about the structure.
if you’re familiar with any germanic language outside English you’ll understand that grammatically “will” as a modal verb gets treated as the predicate, and “look as good” gets treated as the object to which it applies
I am very familiar with most of the ancient and modern Germanic languages, and this is incorrect for all of them. This is straightforwardly demonstrable by using a language with overt Case, like German. If modals actually got treated as the Case assigner (seemingly what you mean by “predicate” here), and the entire VP was treated as the object, then we would not expect a transitive German sentence with a modal to result in accusative Case assignment on an actual direct object noun in the sentence (because under your analysis the verb would have already received that structural Case).
But, when we check the German data:
“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.
I’m honestly not sure where you got this idea. You may be getting confused with the “complement” structural relation, because direct objects are (depending on the analysis) complements of their verbal heads, and VPs are also complements of TP/IP (or wherever you put modals in your framework), but it is definitely not the case that VPs “are treated as the object to which it applies” in sentences like this in any Germanic language.
Also, “will” would not be considered a predicate by itself under most generative analyses (though it could be considered a Fregean predicate, but that definition isn’t really useful in syntax, more semantics). Under most generative syntactic analyses, which instead use Aristotelean predicates, the subject of this sentence is “you”, and the predicate is everything else, that is, the entirety of “will not look as good”. It’s true that “will” is in the position where phi-features are normally expressed (again, as visible in German “werde”), but just because conjugation appears to happen at I/T, that doesn’t mean that everything lower in the structure is a direct object.
Maybe you were thinking of multiclausal constructions like “I want to go to the gym”, where [to go to the gym] is an argument of the verb “want”, though whether you’d call it a “direct object” again depends on your framework and assumptions. Either way, that’s not what we’re dealing with in this case (and I can demonstrate that with examples if requested). But check out ECM Constructions for some interesting Case-related phenomena surrounding multiclausal constructions if you’re interested!
Back on topic, we see that Yoda’s line here (aside from the clause structure within the adjunct clause) also perfectly follows my expected pattern (as you also noted in your comment). It’s actually an even better example, because it shows both modal and negation stranding.
From the base word order, “You will not look as good”, we see the expected fronting of the VP and everything lower in the structure, that is “look as good” to the front of the sentence, stranding everything higher in the structure, including the modal and negation, at the end of the string with “you will not”.
I hope this makes sense. Let me know if you have other questions, but it’s possible that further/more detailed explanations may not make much sense without some experience with generative syntax, or that we have different theoretical assumptions of some sort that make our descriptions of the data incompatible.
This is gonna be a long one, but there’s a lot in your comment to unpack.
Note that I specifically excluded the OT from my analysis because it doesn’t show the same systematic syntax that the PT does. But, the core clausal structure of the “900 years” line also perfectly follows my analysis, so I feel comfortable commenting on it here.
First, the “prepositional phrase” (it’s actually a conditional clause acting as an adjunct, not a prepositional phrase) doesn’t really need to be addressed, because sentential adjuncts in English can be positioned relatively freely.
For example: “When I go to the store, I will buy bread”, “I, when I go to the store, will buy bread”, “I will, when I go to the store, buy bread”, and “I will buy bread when I go to the store” are all fine, with perhaps slightly different pragmatic contexts that license them.
This means that adjunct clauses like “when 900 years you reach” (which itself does not follow the usual PT convention, which would be “when reach 900 years you do”) are not very useful for determining main clause sentence structure, and should mostly be ignored in analyses like these except in special cases where it actually has something to say about the structure.
I am very familiar with most of the ancient and modern Germanic languages, and this is incorrect for all of them. This is straightforwardly demonstrable by using a language with overt Case, like German. If modals actually got treated as the Case assigner (seemingly what you mean by “predicate” here), and the entire VP was treated as the object, then we would not expect a transitive German sentence with a modal to result in accusative Case assignment on an actual direct object noun in the sentence (because under your analysis the verb would have already received that structural Case).
But, when we check the German data:
“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.
I’m honestly not sure where you got this idea. You may be getting confused with the “complement” structural relation, because direct objects are (depending on the analysis) complements of their verbal heads, and VPs are also complements of TP/IP (or wherever you put modals in your framework), but it is definitely not the case that VPs “are treated as the object to which it applies” in sentences like this in any Germanic language.
Also, “will” would not be considered a predicate by itself under most generative analyses (though it could be considered a Fregean predicate, but that definition isn’t really useful in syntax, more semantics). Under most generative syntactic analyses, which instead use Aristotelean predicates, the subject of this sentence is “you”, and the predicate is everything else, that is, the entirety of “will not look as good”. It’s true that “will” is in the position where phi-features are normally expressed (again, as visible in German “werde”), but just because conjugation appears to happen at I/T, that doesn’t mean that everything lower in the structure is a direct object.
Maybe you were thinking of multiclausal constructions like “I want to go to the gym”, where [to go to the gym] is an argument of the verb “want”, though whether you’d call it a “direct object” again depends on your framework and assumptions. Either way, that’s not what we’re dealing with in this case (and I can demonstrate that with examples if requested). But check out ECM Constructions for some interesting Case-related phenomena surrounding multiclausal constructions if you’re interested!
Back on topic, we see that Yoda’s line here (aside from the clause structure within the adjunct clause) also perfectly follows my expected pattern (as you also noted in your comment). It’s actually an even better example, because it shows both modal and negation stranding.
From the base word order, “You will not look as good”, we see the expected fronting of the VP and everything lower in the structure, that is “look as good” to the front of the sentence, stranding everything higher in the structure, including the modal and negation, at the end of the string with “you will not”.
I hope this makes sense. Let me know if you have other questions, but it’s possible that further/more detailed explanations may not make much sense without some experience with generative syntax, or that we have different theoretical assumptions of some sort that make our descriptions of the data incompatible.