Indonesian and English sentence patterns: A contrastive syntactic perspective

Abstract

In learning a foreign language, comprehending similarities and differences between the source language and the target language is crucial to become proficient in the target language. This scientifically can be done by contrasting the two languages. This research aims to contrast two languages, Indonesian language as the source language and English language as the target language. This study contrasts Indonesian and English by examining simple declarative sentence patterns, with the aim of outlining their similarities and differences. The scope of the investigation is limited to the comparison of simple declarative sentence patterns in both languages. The primary objective of this study is to identify and describe the similarities and differences in simple declarative constructions across the two linguistic systems. The Contrastive Analysis method is used to contrast the patterns of sentence structure in both languages. Declarative sentences are categorized into transitive, ditransitive, intransitive, nominal, adjectival, prepositional, and numeral patterns. The result of this study reveals that Indonesian and English share declarative patterns in transitive, ditransitive, and intransitive forms, while differing in nominal, adjectival, prepositional, and numeral types. Simple declarative sentences in Indonesian and English share several structural patterns in transitive, ditransitive, and intransitive constructions. However, Indonesian also allows nominal, adjectival, prepositional, and numeral declarative sentences, which employ complements as predicates and are not found in English. Conversely, English exhibits patterns absent in Indonesian; those formed with intensive verbs (to be) functioning as the predicate.