An Analysis of Predicate Structures In The Headlines of The Jakarta Post- Academic Writing

Language has important role in the persistence of life, language is used as a medium of communication and interaction, which is indispensable as a main tool of human communication. Language has been glue to hold the society in the communication process. Therefore, language has a quite significant role in the existence of human life.

As it is known, there are many languages in this world. Each language has differences. The differences can be in the form, structure, and grammar. One of languages in the world is English. English is the language of United Kingdom or it is best known as England. Which is used in British Commonwealth, the USA and some other countries (Hornby, 1995:382). English belongs to Indo-European family. It is known as the greatest number of language used in many countries.

In communication era, information about science and technology is mostly written in English since it is considered as one of international languages. Information that comes to the society is difficult to be filtered lately. In fact, mass media such as newspaper, television, radio play important role in human life. Moreover their functions are not only as information sources but also as public learning particularly language learning. In addition, most people use mass media to explore the knowledge, and so on. In short, newspapers have great emphasis on the social and formal function.

In Indonesia, there many kinds of newspaper, based on the language it is divide into two types. Indonesian newspaper and English newspaper. Indonesian newspaper includes JAWA POS, KEDAULATAN RAKYAT, KOMPAS, and MEDIA INDONESIA.etc. On the other hand English newspaper which is written in English language includes JAKARTA POST, INDONESIAN OBSERVER, and so on.

Dealing with English newspaper in Indonesia, it can help the Indonesian or the readers as second language learner to improve their acquisition of English. Therefore, for that reason, the writer uses the JAKARTA POST as the object of research. Because JAKRTA POST is written by using Standard English language, so from reading and understanding the sentence pattern used in that newspaper hopefully can help the readers to learn English structure, because learning English is not only from the book but also from other sources, such as English newspaper, English article, and English magazine. From that media the reader can learn more about the grammatical aspects. One of them is syntactical aspect of language which deals with word, phrase clause, sentences, and so on. As Alwasilah stated in her book entitled linguistik suatu pengantar, syntax is the branch of grammar that is concerned with the study of the arrangement of words in sentences and of the means by which such relationship are shown. Ex: word order or inflection.

From the definition of syntax above the writer tries to analyze the Predicate structures in the headlines of the Jakarta Post, because the analysis of predicate structure is one of syntax analysis, so it is interesting to be discussed.

Based on the reason above this syntax analysis is conducted, it is aimed to identify the patterns of the predicate structures in order to show the way the predicate structures occur in the headlines. And to classify the characteristic of newspaper headlines sentence. This research is also for educational reason.