Grammatical Competence of The Deaf by Written Language Base on Social Media Facebook

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the grammatical competence of deaf people as revealed through their language performance (sentence) on social media Facebook. This is motivated by the fact that deaf people are proven to be able to be given linguistic stimulus (linguistic environment) as well as normal people (hearing people). It must be admitted that the language performance of deaf people is very different from the language performance of normal people, but it can be paraphrased or reconstructed, so that the grammatical competencies embedded in their minds are described. Sentence data is taken purposively from social media Facebook. The sample is three to five sentence forms for each type, then analyzed by qualitative descriptive analysis method based on a structural grammar approach. The result is that the single sentences of the deaf are proven to be patterned, which are spread into five basic sentence patterns, namely NP+VP, NP+AP, NP+NP, NP+NumP, and NP+PrepP. However, at the morphological level, it was revealed that the dominant morphological words were only affixation words, namely the affixes of ber-, di-, ke-, per-an, and ke-an. In general, these affixes are used in an unusual way, except for the prefixes on certain words, such as play. Then, at the syntactic level, in general the pattern of phrases made is the opposite pattern of the general pattern of Indonesian phrases, namely the head-attribute pattern to attribute-head and vice versa. There are also grammatical deviations in the field, which are caused by (1) omitting and (2) unusual word order variations.