A Linguistic Analysis of Sentence Types in Police Advisory Posters in Baubau City, Indonesia

Abstract

This study examines the types of sentences used in public security and community-order posters displayed in public spaces in Baubau City, Indonesia. Public security posters serve as an important medium for conveying concise and accessible messages to diverse audiences; therefore, the selection of sentence types plays a significant role in shaping the clarity, directness, and communicative force of public messages. The study employs a qualitative descriptive approach using content analysis. The data consist of seven official public security and community-order posters collected through documentation from various public spaces in Baubau City, including city parks, terminals, markets, major roads, and other public facilities. The data comprise sentences contained in the poster texts, which were classified into declarative, imperative, interrogative, and exclamatory sentence types based on their structural and communicative functions. The results indicate that imperative sentences are the most dominant type, primarily functioning to issue commands, prohibitions, warnings, and appeals directly to the public. Declarative sentences complement these directives by providing contextual information and reinforcing the rationale underlying the intended actions. Exclamatory sentences occur less frequently and function primarily to intensify the emotional force and urgency of the messages, whereas interrogative sentences are absent from the dataset. These findings demonstrate that the linguistic strategy employed in public security posters is predominantly directive and action-oriented, emphasizing clarity, assertiveness, and communicative efficiency in one-way public communication. The study further suggests that sentence-type selection constitutes an important linguistic resource for constructing persuasive and context-sensitive public security messages in shared urban spaces.