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3.3 Basic Sentence Structure
In this section we will be concerned with the basic
structure of Acehnese sentences and the structures of the
two major sentence constituents, verb phrase and noun
phrase.
Despite the fact that a sentence in Acehnese can begin
with either the subject or the predicate, and it can even
consist of only a predicate or a subject, we will assume
that it has a basic structure. This is not unusual because
this kind of assumption is also made by linguists dealing
with Indonesian, a language which also allows several types
of word orders in a sentence. It may be useful to give here
a comparison between Indonesian and Acehnese sentences in
various word orders. Readers with some Indonesian background
will benefit from this comparison in understanding the
nature of Acehnese structures. It should be noted that
Indonesian is considered as an SV language. 2 The following
variations of word order are common in both languages.
[i]. Subject-predicate:
Indonesian: Dia pergi ke pasar.
He go to town
'He is going to town.'
2 See Kaswanti Purwo (1985)