Imej Wanita dalam Undang-Undang Melaka: Pembuktian Linguistik.

Undang-Undang Melaka is considered as one of the traditional texts masterpiece. The making of Undang-Undang Melaka was commanded by Sultan Muzaffar and has been widely referred by other Malay states in constructing their traditional rule of laws. This text discusses criminal, commerce and family laws. One of the aspects discussed was on the position of women. Apparently, issues on women have always attracted attention from various perspectives such as law, history, sociology and literature. Linguistics perspective is not an exception. This article attempts to explore the positioning of women in traditional law established in Undang-Undang Melaka (UUM), 2003. The positioning of women is seen based on the linguistics evidence that is from the cognitive semantics approach. The study managed to identify two typologies of women that are derived from the Quran and Hadith. The two typologies are: 'women are from the ribs of man', and 'women's witness is half of a man's witness'. This paper also elaborated on the marriage relationship -- divorce or sustenance of marriage due to illnesses and discusses the witness status for men and women. It is understood that the status of men in becoming a witness is more dominant as compared to women. The findings show that the position of women is best described with cognitive mechanism, namely the image schema and conceptual metaphor. The image schema produced for these two typologies is the image schema PART-WHOLE. The analysis also proves the intellectual of Malays in outlining the laws. Obviously, linguistic analysis on women has further uncovered the superiority of this text and simultaneously enhances the corpus as a research data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]