A COMPARATIVE STUDY ON SYNTACTIC STRUCTURES BETWEEN PALI AND ENGLISH

Abstract

The purposes of this research included: 1) to study the syntactic structures of Pali and English; 2) to compare the syntactic structures of Pali and English; and 3) to analyze techniques in connecting the syntactic structures of Pali and English. It is a documentary research. The data were analyzed through the theories of case grammar 1970 and grammatical structures in analyzing sample sentences in various patterns of both Pali and English.  The findings of this research were as follows. (1) The syntactic structure of Pali and English consists of words, phrases, and clauses. In Pali, there are seven ways to build words including: (1) building words through declension in case of noun; (2) building words through addition to suffixes in noun derivative; (3) building words through compound words; 4) building words through secondary derivation; 5) building words through affixation; 6) building words through declension in case of finite verb; 7) building words through addition to suffixes in participle derivative. (2) The syntactic structures of Pali and English are both different and similar. They similarly build words for their own use by using inflectional words. However, there are differences that Pali has a more complex technique in building words. They both have the same phrase and similarity in building phrases but not exactly the same and the number of phrases are not equal. They both have similar clauses but the structures of clauses are different. Clauses in Pali use complex sentence as a crucial component of sentence structure whereas English uses relative pronouns and coordinators as a crucial component of sentence structure. They both have voices but different in numbers: there are 5 voices in Pali whereas 2 voices in English while voices of both languages have similar structure. (3) The technique for connecting the syntactic structure of Pali and English is both different and similar i.e. to be similar in putting words, noun phrases, syllable nouns such as putting an adjective in front of a noun to function as a modifier of a noun; putting a noun or a noun phrase as a subject in the beginning of a sentence; putting a noun or a noun phrase as an object in Pali in front of a verb.