Contrastive Analysis REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
23 Contrastive analysis was in practice used to predict errors, although it as
initially sought to identify areas of language learning difficulty. This assumes that error and difficulty can be equated Lennon, 2008.
Related to the difference between English and Indonesian language, Sagala 2014 mentioned that there are several items in which the differences
might cause difficulty. They will be elaborated in the following paragraphs. The first is pluralization. Indonesian language does not have definite rules
how to create plural form of a word except by reduplicating it, such as ‘rumah- rumah’ houses, ‘mobil-mobil’ cars. It can also be done by adding words
indicating that the number is more than one, like ‘para tamu’ the guests, ‘banyak rumah’ many houses. On the other hand, English has very clear and
strict rules in which suffix –s or –es should be attached into the pluralized noun, or change the form of the noun to indicate the pluralization such as ‘man’ into
‘men’. The next part is in the sentence structure. The basic order for sentences in
Indonesian language is Subject, Verb, Object or Adjective or Adverb. In syntactical term, it can be defined S = NP.VP. This means that a sentence consists
of Noun Phrase and Verb Phrase. This, however, is not a strict form because the order can be put in many various ways, such as NP.VP or NP.NP or NP.PP.
Whereas in English, the order of the sentence lies strictly on S = NP.VP. Sometimes it occurs where VP comes with to be or linking verb. It can be seen in
the following examples.
24
Indonesian English
NP.VP NP.VP
Paman pergi ke Surabaya tadi malam Uncle went to Surabaya last night
NP.AdvP NP.VP
Bibi di kebun Aunty is in the garden
NP.AP NP.VP
Brudin sakit semalam Brudin was sick last night
NP.NP NP.VP
Kebanyakan warga desa ini nelayan Most citizen of this village are
sailors
NP: Noun Phrase, Adv P: Adverbial Phrase, AP: Adjective Phrase,VP: Verb Phrase
Another part is passive voice. Although passive is rare in speech, it occurs quite often in acedemic writing. The grammatical rule to form passive in English
is by following pattern ‘to be + past participle’ that can vary according to the subject as well as the tense, such as ‘be eaten,’ ‘is being eaten,’ ‘has been eaten’
etceteras. In Indonesian language, passive is constructed by adding prefix di- in the verb, like dimakan, diminum, dibaca. In passive sentence the focus goes to
Subject, a term known as Canonical passive. A case of point is ‘Buku itu sudah dibaca oleh Andy’ which is equvalent to ‘The book has been read by Andy.’
However, in Indonesian language, the focus of passive sentence may go to the Object, a term called non canonical passive. This phenomenon does not occur in
English. The following examples shall elaborate this.
Indonesian English
Active: Active:
Erni menulis makalah ini. Erni writes this paper
Passive :
Passive :
Makalah ini ditulis oleh Erni This paper is written by Erni
Makalah ini ditulis Erni Makalah ini Erni tulis NonCanonical PassiveObject focus
25 In English, construction where the focus is on the object happen in relative
clauses. However, in Indonesian language, relative clauses of object pattern type change the voice of the verb while in English they do not. It means that the
antecedent referred to by the relative pronoun becomes an object focus in Indonesian. Compare the following English sentences with their Indonesian
counterparts. Another aspect is subject prominiscence. English is a subject prominent
language. It means every sentence in English always requires a subject. The subject can be a proper name, pronoun or something else. Yet in Indonesian, the
subject may be omitted. This phenomenon can be mentioned as Zero subject sentence.
Another part where English is different from Indonesian language is in gender and kinship orientation. The idea of gender orientation in English is
commonly used in the form of pronoun, both subject and object. It may appear as he, she, him or her. More than that, the gender orientation is also used to
differentiate subjects in a sentence. There are many terms to differentiate subject. One is used to differentiate siblings. We find the words “brother” and “sister” is
aimed to differentiate male and female siblings, or son or daughter to differentiate male and female child. In Indonesian the term of gender orientation is not well
known. When talking about a child, Indonesian commonly say ‘anak’ without referring what sex the child has. English will say a boy or a girl instead of a child.
Besides the differences mentioned in above paragraphs, English and Indonesian also have similiarities. The similarities can be seen in the following:
26 1 Both English and Indonesian language use the same 26 letter alphabet, divided
similarly between vowels and consonants. 2 The ways of arranging sentences and paragraphs are similar.
3 Both languages use similar methods of classifying word types into nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, pronouns, etceteras.
4 Both languages form words in the same way by attaching prefixes and suffixes to root words
5 Both languages have transitive and intransitive structures 6 Both languages have passive and active voice.
7 Both languages use similar numbering systems except that Indonesian uses a decimal dot instead of a comma as 3 digit separator
8 Both languages use similar punctuation marks such as commas, periods, parenthesis, question marks, quotation marks, and hyphens.
9 Symbols are nearly the same for both languages 10 Capitalization is nearly the same for both languages