A FORMAL ANALYSIS ON SENTENCE STRUCTURE OF THE DIRECT SPEECH IN AMBROSE BIERCE’S STALEY FLEMING’S HALLUCINATION

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the direct speech in the story of Ambrose Bierce’s Staley Fleming’s Hallucination using a syntactical analysis called formal grammar analysis, which concerns only on the structure of the sentence. The method used is formal grammar analysis, the tree diagram analysis. The goal of the study is to give a proof that a literary work can be analyzed using a linguistic theory. The first step to conduct the study is differentiating the direct speech in the story from the indirect one. After the differentiation, the next step is analyzing the sentences which pass the Phrase Structure Rule, the Lexical Rule, and the Movement rule. Then, the ones which pass the rules are divided based on the characteristics into four groups of sentence, the simple sentence, the complex sentence, compound sentence, and compound-complex sentence. The last step of the study is analyzing the sentences using the tree diagram to show the constituents of each sentence. The results of the study show that not all sentences are analyzable. The analyzable sentences are then analyzed using the tree diagram in order to explain the function of each constituent. After the analysis, the story line can be drawn in a brief explanation. From the study, the conclusions which can be taken are; first, not all sentences is analyzable; second, the story is dominated by direct speech using the simple sentence which gives sense that the readers are involved in the story easily; the last one is that there are variations of sentence structure used in the story which avoid the story from being boring.