Beyond Similarity and Difference: A Contrastive Syntactic Study of Noun Phrase Formation and Function in English and Acehnese

Abstract

This study examines noun phrase formation and grammatical function in English and Acehnese through a contrastive syntactic analysis. It investigates how the two languages express comparable nominal meanings and grammatical relations while organizing noun phrase constituents differently. The study adopts a qualitative, document-based approach using published grammatical descriptions and previous studies of English and Acehnese, with particular reference to Durie (1985) and Rizqi (2017). The analysis focuses on noun phrase heads, nominal modification, demonstratives, possession, quantity and classifiers, and post-head expansion. The findings indicate that English and Acehnese share broad functional similarities in noun phrase use, but differ in the ordering and grammatical realization of their constituents. English commonly places determiners, possessive forms, and adjectives before the head noun, whereas documented Acehnese constructions exhibit patterns in which certain modifiers follow the head and quantity expressions involve classifiers. These patterns demonstrate that functional similarity does not necessarily entail structural equivalence. The study proposes three analytical categories for interpreting the comparison: functional convergence, structural correspondence, and grammatical divergence. It contributes to contrastive syntax by emphasizing the need to describe each language according to its own grammatical organization rather than treating English constituent order as a universal model. Because the analysis relies on published descriptions and selected examples rather than a systematically compiled parallel corpus, the findings are descriptive and should not be interpreted as evidence of construction frequency or of patterns shared by all Acehnese varieties. Further research using systematically collected and contextualized data is needed to examine the distribution of these constructions and their implications for language teaching.