ABSTRACT
‘Dora the Explorer’ is a cartoon film which is created to teach language to children. It indicates that the sentences used are in the form of simple sentences. As one of the media to teach language, this cartoon film has reached high-grade score for the most audiences in the world. Therefore, it is interesting to conduct a research about how the syntactic structure of the sentences used in the film is. Then, in this research I investigated the data based on two problems, they are 1) what kinds of syntactic structures are used in the sentences used in ‘Dora the Explorer’? and 2) How are those syntactic structures applied in Chinese boxes? The objectives of the study are to describe types of syntactic structures used in the sentences used in the film, and to apply those syntactic structures in Chinese boxes.
Qualitative method is used in this research because the data are in the form of words rather than in numbers and statistics. Besides that, this method is used in order to get answers of the problems of the research. The data are taken from the utterances spoken by the main character on ‘Dora the Explorer’. After the data are collected, they are classified and analyzed based on Francis’ theory of syntactic structures.
This study finds the four kinds of syntactic structures; they are structure of modification, structure of predication, structure of complementation, and struc-ture of coordination, with detail explanation:
The first, Structure of modification consists of the head noun (with modifier noun, adjective, adverb, noun determiner, possessive, structure of modification, structure of predication, structure of complementation, and structure of coordination), verb (adjective, adverb, prepositional phrase, and structure of complementation), adjective (qualifier and structure of complementation), posses-sive (noun-phrase), structure of modification (verb-infinitive, adverb, noun deter-miner, and structure of predication), structure of predication (adverb and con-junction), structure of complementation (structure of complementation). The se-cond, Structure of predication consists of subject pronoun (with predicate verb-phrase, structure of modification, and structure of complementation), adverb (structure of complementation), noun-proper name (structure of complementa-tion), structure of modification (structure of modification), structure of com-plementation (verb, structure of modification, and structure of complemen-tation). The third, Structure of complementation consists of verbal element verb (with complement pronoun, noun, structure of modification, and structure of predi
