A syntactic analysis of the Acehnese phrase structure: The application of Chomskyʹʹs Government and Binding Theory NOTE: The

The aim of this study is to analyze the phrase structure rules of the Acehnese language using the Government and Binding Theory. It attempts to describe Acehnese sentence transformations and to examine whether this model is applicable to Acehnese phrase structures, and if not what its constraints and modifications are. The analysis focuses on the phrase markers or tree diagrams of grammatical and well-formed Acehnese noun phrases (NPs) and verb phrases (VPs). The method of analysis is based on the one proposed by Haegeman in Introduction to Government & Binding Theory (1994). Most sample test sentences were taken from A Contextual Grammar of Acehnese (Asyik, 1987). The findings show that the syntactic structure of English and Acehnese can adopt the projection schema, the X’-format that has been developed for all phrasal categories. However, the analysis shows that the linear order of constituents with respect to the head projection is not universally fixed. In general, the structures of Acehnese phrases are similar to that of English except that they contain more elements in a phrase structure. Acehnese differs significantly from English and other languages in that it does not have number and tense agreement, adjectives are post-position and there is pro-drop or null-subject.