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3.1 Word Qrdar
CHAPTER 3
SENTENCES
There is no agreement among writers concerning the word
order of Acehnese sentences. One claim is that word order in
Acehnese is SVO, as in Lawler (1975 and 1977) and Asyik
(1982), although none of these papers deal with Acehnese
typology. A serious discussion on Acehnese typology was
first given in Durie (1982) where it was argued that word
order in Acehnese was VO le-A (A for "agent") for transitive
verbs and VS for intransitive verbs. A very comprehensive
treatment on the subject can be found in Durie (1985).
However, no basic word order is proposed. This is because
word order in Acehnese is considered free in the sense that
it does not encode grammatical relations. But there is a
statement which actually defines the basic word order. It
says that the pre-verb position (Core Topic position in
Durie's account) in Acehnese sentences is a position used to
foreground participants whose identity is already known. (See
Durie (1985:191).) Thus, the basic word order must look like
this:
- VERB - (ARGUMENT) - (ARGUMENT)
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