Problem Encountered by the Students in Determining Deep and Surface Structure (Case Study at English Department in IAIN Cot Kala Langsa)

Syntax is the linguistics study which learns about the sentences. Here, the students must know about the structure of sentences and explain about the words classification.The deep structure is the output of the base rule and the input to the semantic component, while surface structure is the sentence which is spoken or written. By doing this research, we will know about students’ problem in determining deep and surface structure in the sentences. The research is quantitative descriptive research. The technique in collecting data in here is test and questionnaire. For this research, all of English department students in the seventh semester will be population. It was done because they have studied about syntax in previous semester. Finally, the writer found that most of all students cannot determine deep and surface structure toward some sentences. They only can determine deep structure toward simple sentence in present tense eventough they still made some mistakes. Almost all of English department students who have studied deep structure have many difficulties in determining deep and surface structure, one of them is because they cannot memorize the words categorizations in deep structure. Because of that, we should be more aware and serious in studying syntax, especially in determining deep and surface structure toward some sentences because it is important for us to know the categorization of words in order to know the meaning of the sentence. It avoid us to misunderstand the meaning of sentences which sometimes have more than one meaning.