the beginning of a sentence. It should perform after the subject and verb. Thus, The standard English
is “My black old mammy’s soul is damn forever havin’ a daughter
”. Since there is no subject in this sentence, the writer adds verb and put the adjective afterward.
One more example of adjectival phrase displacement is illustrated as follows.
Listen, Kid Sleepy, ln 1 Kid Sleepy
said, ln 8
Listen, Kid Sleepy, ln 10 Kid Sleepy
said, ln 16 Datum No.3
This datum No.3 is taken from the poem “Kid Sleepy” that tells about a
sleepy kid who does not care about anything around himher. Even though he is under the hot sun, he will not make a move to where the shade is. In the sentence,
there is an categorized as adjective displacement because in the standard structure, the adjective i.e. sleepy must come first before the noun since it modifies the
noun. Thus, “Kid Sleepy” should be written as “Sleepy Kid”. The term “Sleepy Kid” is used to show a relationship among black people.
Sometimes few of them would rather be quiet and neglect some cases. They are just too sleepy or lazy to take care of the problems again. There are just too much
problems. Hughes used this term to compare the character of a “Sleepy Kid‟ with
the relationship among African-American. The term adjectival phrase is commonly used for any phrase in attributive
position, whether it is technically an adjective phrase, noun phrase, or prepositional phrase. These may be more precisely distinguished as phrasal
attributives or attributive phrases. This definition is commonly used in English
style guides for writing, where the terms attributive and adjective are frequently treated as synonyms, because attributive phrases are typically hyphenated,
whereas predicative phrases generally are not, despite both modifying a noun.
g. Adverb Displacement
The last syntactic deviation found in the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes is adverb displacement. Adverbs are traditionally defined as words that
describe verbs, adjectives, and other adverbs. Thoms, G. 2010:57 states that adverb displacements often happen when they are restricted to appear in specific
positions related to other elements in a sentence. This adverb displacement also happens in many poems.
These are two adverb displacements in the finding. The adverb displacements are found in the poem entitled
“The Weary Blues” where the noun phrase and prepositional phrase displacements are found i.e. in the following line.
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
Datum No.31 Adverb phrase appears in datum No.31 and forms as a complement. The
phrase “far into the night” gives additional information on the time signal. In structural terms, adverb of time can be put at the beginning or at the end of the
sentence. But, looking at the sentence pattern of parallelism, the sentence order is Subject-Verb-Complement. Thus, the adverb of time should be put at the back of
the sentence so that it gives a distinguish differences toward the meaning of the whole sentence and obeys the rule of parallel sentence. The standard English
supposes to be “…and he crooned that tune far into the night”.
Another example of adverb phrase displacement is shown in the following datum.
Humbly I tried to learn, ln 3
Datum No.32 Datum No.32
is taken from a poem titled “Teacher”. Here, the adverb is put in front of the sentence. Since the word humbly should modify the word tried
to learn , it supposes to be written “I tried to learn more humbly” to emphasize
more on the persona‟s trying to learn.
Overall, there are 88 syntactic deviations that appear in the Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. The data taken as examples in this chapter have
represented seven types of syntactic deviations, which are: multiple negation, inversion, noun phrase displacement, preposition displacement, subject
displacement, adjectival phrase and adverb displacement.
2. The Author’s Purposes Wrote The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
Using Syntactic Deviations
As discussed in Chapter 2, Hughes portrayed the life of African-American. He made them into a collection of poems. The collection of the poems itself has
several topics as the major concern. They are: a to show jazz music that express as sorrow and loneliness; b to portray American dream; c to show African-
American‟s struggle; d to depict racism in America; e to face difficulty wisely; f to show self-actualization; and g to show the other problems faced by
African-American. The further explanations are discussed below.
