His study aims to describe the types and functions of phrases in the children's story book Asal-Usul Burung Hantu by Prima Duantika through a syntactic approach. The analysis is grounded in the theory of the phrase in structural Indonesian syntax, which views the phrase as a non-predicative grammatical unit consisting of two or more words that does not cross functional boundaries, with categories classified by their head element and a framework of syntactic functions comprising subject, predicate, object, and adverbial. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative with a syntactic perspective. The data were collected through observation, note-taking, and documentation techniques on all phrases found in the story text, and the classification was verified through inter-rater checking and theoretical triangulation. The results show that there are 921 phrases consisting of noun phrases (45.6%), verb phrases (25.8%), adjective phrases (10.4%), adverbial phrases (6.3%), prepositional phrases (8.9%), and numeral phrases (3.0%). In terms of syntactic function, predicate functions dominate with 278 data, followed by subjects (246), adverbials (224), and objects (173). The dominance of noun phrases indicates that children's story texts tend to use concrete and simple nominal constructions, while the dominant sentence pattern is Subject-Predicate-Object-Adverbial. The findings offer two contributions. Theoretically, they show that the category-function relation of phrases holds consistently in a children's folktale corpus, and they supply a quantitative phrase profile that can serve as a point of comparison for syntactic studies of other children's texts. Practically, this profile can be used by teachers and teaching-material developers as a basis for levelling reading materials and for designing lessons on phrases and sentence patterns in primary school.
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