Omission Errors in Indonesian Students’ Sentence Construction: A Semantic Agreement Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates omission errors in Indonesian students’ sentence constructions with a focus on semantic agreement. The purpose of the study is to identify and analyze how omission of linguistic elements affects grammaticality and sentence structure in academic writing. A qualitative descriptive method was employed, and the data were taken from students’ written academic texts consisting of 69 ungrammatical sentences. The data were collected through documentation and analyzed using linguistic error analysis based on syntactic and semantic principles. The findings reveal two main categories of omission errors: omission of function words and omission of syntactic function elements. Omission of function words includes the absence of the complementizer bahwa and elements of correlative conjunctions such as baik … maupun …. Meanwhile, omission of syntactic elements involves the absence of subjects and the use of prepositional phrases in subject position. These errors indicate that students tend to prioritize semantic meaning over grammatical structure, resulting in sentences that are interpretable but structurally incomplete. The study highlights that omission errors are closely related to students’ limited understanding of sentence structure and the transfer of spoken language patterns into academic writing. These findings suggest the need for explicit instruction on grammatical completeness and sentence structure in Indonesian academic writing.