A Syntactic Analysis Of The Drama Script” Beauty Is A Beast By D. M. Larson
Keywords:
Syntactic Analysis; Drama Script; Phrase Structure Grammar; Constituent Structure; English SyntaxAbstract
Drama scripts provide authentic language data that can be systematically examined from a syntactic perspective. As a literary text, a drama script contains various sentence constructions that reflect the organization of English grammatical structures and conversational language use. This study aimed to analyze the syntactic structures found in the drama script Beauty is a Beast by D. M. Larson. The study employed a descriptive qualitative research design using document analysis. The data source was the drama script Beauty is a Beast, from which fifteen representative verb sentences were purposively selected for syntactic analysis. Data were collected through repeated reading, sentence identification, and classification, and were analyzed using phrase structure grammar and constituent tree diagrams within the framework of generative syntax. The analysis focused on identifying noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, adverb phrases, prepositional phrases, complementizer phrases, and their hierarchical relationships. The findings revealed four major syntactic phenomena: overt constituents, empty constituents, agrammatical constructions, and deviations from canonical syntactic distribution. Overt constituent structures were the most dominant, while empty constituents occurred through covert complements, empty complementizers, and omitted infinitival markers that were recoverable from the discourse context. The study concludes that the drama script combines well-formed grammatical structures with conversational syntactic variations, making it a valuable resource for syntactic analysis and stylistic studies in English linguistics.
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