00402

29
prove or disprove any particular theory of grammar.
This grammar is based on the dialect of North Aceh. The
data were collected primarily from the area around Teupin
Punti (my village), 15 km to the east of Lhokseumawe.
Additional data were also collected from informants from
Matang Glumpang Dua, a town to the west of Lhokseumawe, near
the town of Bireuen. The data were collected by taping
conversations and stories from the informants. Since I
myself am a native speaker of this dialect, I did not do
much elicitation. There were also data from East Aceh in the
form of taped speeches and stories, which I obtained through
a friend. I also had some commercial tapes containing
commedies and plays by performing groups from around
Bireuen. Written data consisted of my previous works,
stories from Budiman Sulaiman (1977), Durie (1985), and some
hikayats.
However, I did not limit myself to using only the data
from this field research. They are somewhat limited in
forms. They did not contain all forms of sentences. If I had
limited myself to these data, many forms of sentences would
have been left undescribed. Sometimes I had to use my own
sentences. They are natural sentences, the sentences known
and used by any native speaker such as myself. Most of the
time, I created new sentences based on the sentences from
the taped or written data. The variant sentences in examples
consisting of more than one variant are all created
sentences. They are variants that are used in daily life,