ABSTRACT
This study examines the meaning of woman as constructed in the corpus of the Sundanese magazine Manglè, published between 1958 and 2013. Using corpus-based and Barthes’s semiotic approaches, the study focuses on the usage of five Sundanese nouns denoting woman in the magazine, spanning four different eras: the Guided Democracy, the New Order, the Transition to Democracy and the Reform Era. The study regards the nouns as signs whose meanings are derived from Barthes’s model of metalanguage. It argues that such meanings are the result of the extension of expression (E2) in the secondary system of a semiological chain, which makes it possible to be analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively using corpus analysis. Therefore, the most or least frequently used signs and the meaning they carried can be explored by investigating the diachronic frequency and semantic preference of the nouns. This contributes to explaining the metalinguistic signs of women and gender construction from different perspectives. This study reveals that diachronically, the word wanoja was found to be the only sign used to denote women in Manglè with constantly increasing frequency. Moreover, it shows that women who were initially portrayed as dependent with regard to their traditional roles were becoming increasingly portrayed as independent in terms of their existence in the public sphere.
