Sentence Patterning in Oscar Wild e `s Short Story "The Devoted Friend"

Abstract

III

Abstract

This study deals with the problem of the variant occurrence of

English BSPs (Basic Sentence

Patterns)

in the selected short story,"The Devoted Friend",by Oscar Wild

e

.The

study tries to investigate

this phenomenon on the basis of syntactic and stylistic ana

lyses

.

It

aims

at

determining

the extent of

the

frequency of English BSPs in the selected text ,presenting semantic and syntactic justifications for that

and showing to which pattern every

chosen

sentence

belongs by ascribing it to one of the BSPs. The

q

uantitative method is adopted in this study

where a structural an

alysis according to Quirk and

Greenbaum(1973)

`s model of English

BSPs

that co

nsists of seven patterns is applied

to the target

population

. Then ,

the score that each one of the

BSP

s has atta

ined is multiplied by one hundred and

divided by the total number of the

analyzed sentences by

the researcher,

using a simple calculator

to

get the percentage that each

BSP

has attained

.

The findings of this study is that the first three BSPs

attain

ed

(228

) points out of three hundred sentences whereas the other four BSPs achieve

d

only (72)

scores in the same text.

The researcher recommends that investigation of English

BSPs

need to be done

on short stories by following other models of English

BSPs

.