Lexical patterns in customary sayings

Customary sayings are the traditional words delivered in the form of poetry and practiced in various social activities in Negeri Sembilan in marriage, family, criminal law and administration. Sudeen (1995) recorded that studies on customary sayings have been conducted from the early 20th century in the history of custom, marriage system, political system and the dispensation of inheritance.This study examines the content words and function words in customary sayings that have been categorized based on the semantic domain concept by Gliozzo (2006). Based on the content words and function words, this study has identified the customary words in the corpus data. The results show that more function words were used in the customary sayings. However, content words dominated the list of customary sayings, such as Datuk and custom. The function words 'nan' and 'dek' were found in all domains of the study namely, political, social and economic domains. These findings indicate that function words are not only grammatically functional, but also used to give an aesthetic impact through the articulation style of the local dialect. On the other hand, the analysis of the content words shows that the use of customary words is influenced by the environment and culture of Adat Perpatih.


INTRODUCTION
This study was motivated by customary sayings as the traditional words dealing with customary law (Ahmad, 1965), in which questions arised on the meaning of traditional words and customary laws.In terms of meaning, the word 'traditional" means "custom or belief that has existed for a long time" (Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, 1995:1776).This definition asserts that the term "traditional" also refers to a custom or a belief that has existed for a long time.Thus, traditional words in this context can be referred to as customary words.Specifically, customary words in the customary sayings are used to record the laws relating to custom, namely Adat Perpatih.Generally, the Malays in Peninsular Malaysia consider that there are two types of Malay customs, namelyA dat Perpatih and Adat Temenggung.The Adat Perpatih is practiced in Negeri Sembilan and Adat Temenggung is practiced outside of Negeri Sembilan namely, Melaka, Johor and Selangor (Ibrahim, 1993).
This study examines the use of customary words in sayings using the corpus linguistic approach.Based on this approach, a number of customary sayings data were generated in the corpus.The purpose is to obtain the frequencies or usage statistics of the content words and functions words in the sayings.The content words and function words were clustered based on the domain.The study identifies the customary words, which are described according to the Adat Perpatih"s context and system.
The field of customary sayings has gained the attention of bothWestern and local researchers.Western researchers have documented the history of custom, marriage system, political system and the dispensation of inheritance since the beginning of the 20 th century (Sudeen, 1995).Later, Sudeen recorded that the writings and documentations about customary sayings by local researchers had emerged in the 1950"s.However, most of the previous studies focus on the documentation.The scientific study of customary sayings only emerged in the 90s, especially by Ibrahim (1993Ibrahim ( , 2003Ibrahim ( , 2010)).In other words, the scientific research about customary sayings is still small in number (see Kadir, 1996;Sudeen, 1995).In this case, Kadir (1996) concluded the weaknesses of previous studies about sayings, i.e. (i) the documentations were not based on examination, description and systematic interpretation, (ii) the Western research lacks understanding of the social system and philosophies in the Adat Perpatih communities, (iii) the local studies are mostly ethnocentric.Therefore, it can be concluded that comprehensive and interpretative studies about customary sayings have not been conducted extensively.
With regard to the criticism and assessment of the previous studies, this study drew upon a number of customary sayings data collected by local researchers.In particular, this study examines the lexicon and their meanings in the customary sayings.The discussion will be based on the context or domain setting.The use of a large data and the study of the meaning of lexical in the sayings are expected to meet the nature of a comprehensive and an interpretative study.

METHOD
This study examines how the words were expressed in the customary sayings.To achieve this goal, as many as 6 customary sayings" collections were generated in the corpus data.The two aspects which were given attention in the method of this study are (i) the construction of corpus, and (ii) the construction of domain.The construction of corpus was done based on the linguistic corpus, while the construction of domain was based on the concept of semantic domain.The following are details on the methods of building the corpus and domain in this study.
This study has selected a number of customary sayings compilations as the corpus, making lexical as the study focus.The corpus data in this study will be used to answer the following questions: (i) what are the most widely used content words and function words in the sayings, (ii) what the customary words sayings are, and (iii) what the usage frequencies are.In other words, this study will highlight the lexical statistics studied, which is the basic technique in a corpus-based study (Biber, Conrad, & Reppen, 1998;Hunston, 2006).This finding will discover the lexical patterns in the sayings, thus, become the sayings' characteristic.
To date, there have been many lexical studies based on the corpus.For example, Jablonkai (2009) studied lexical in newspapers and legislation texts, Esimaje (2012) examined the usage of lexical in sermons, Mazdayasna and Firouzi (2013) examined the lexical adjective in novels and technical texts; and Molavi, Koosha and Hosseini (2014) explored the lexicon in text books.These studies examined the lexical in various types of data.On the other hand, this study examines the customary sayings, which can be categorized as the literary genres The procedure for the construction of corpus was conducted as follows: (i) collection of all data using the scanning equipment (scanner) through an Android application, namely the OCR Text Scanner, (ii) transferred into Word format, which is size 1 Word file, 665.2 kb (41,764 TOKENS words) which contained 417 pages, (iii) transfer of Word file to Plain Text format size 294.647kb to generate the corpus using AntConc 3.4.4w software (Windows) 2014 to obtain the frequency of content words and function words.For the purpose of this study, only the 10 highest content words and function words will be discussed.
Currently, the semantic domain is the latest development in the computational linguistic study.Related to this, the data of this study were clustered based on the semantic domain concept proposed by Gliozzo (2006, see also Gliozzo & Strapparava, 2009): In our usage, Semantic Domains are common areas of human discussions, such as ECONOMICS, POLITICS, LAW, SCIENCE, which demonstrate lexical coherence.The Semantic Domain associated to a particular field is the set of domains specific terms belonging to it, and it is characterized by a set of domain words whose main property is to co-occur in texts.
The above statement mentions that semantic domain is often discussed in the domains of economics, politics, law and science, based on lexical relation.The semantic domain concept corresponds to the customary sayings as stated by Ibrahim (2010:1), "Adat Perpatih was built around a communal kin-based social, politic and economic system".This statement confirms that Adat Perpatih practiced among the Negeri Sembilan community was established based on the social, political and economic systems.Customary sayings have been descended from generation to generation and cover various aspects of life such as the appointment of leaders, matters of inheritance, law of marriage, social practice and the punitive system.
All of these systematic practices can be divided into three main domains, namely, political, social and economic domains.
In actual fact, the domain concept was used by the local researchers, i.e.Selat (1975) and Ibrahim (2010).However, the usage of these domains was not discussed from the semantic aspect.Instead, they were using the 'system' concept; for instance, Selat (1975) states that each community has their own respective system.The Adat Perpatih has its own system manifested through customary sayings.In his research, Selat has categorized 6 sub-systems that exist in Adat Perpatih, Copyright © 2018, IJAL, EISSN 2502-6747 namely, value system, kinship system, political system, economic system, customary law system and stratification system.Ibrahim (2010) also discusses the Adat Perpatih system in Negeri Sembilan based on the following division namely, social, political and economic systems.The social system refers to descend, clan, adoption and marriage.The political system refers to the political hierarchy.The economic system is related to customary inheritance.Ibrahim's division is found to be better than Selat's categorization.At least, Ibrahim has established 3 main systems, namely social, political and economic systems.Each system is divided into several sub-systems, respectively.
However, based on the examination, it was found that the division of system and subsystem of the customary sayings by the local researches shows an overlapping.For instance, the value system category by Selat is also found in other subsystems, for example political, economy, customary law and stratification systems.Ibrahim did not specifically discuss the customary sayings, instead, the Adat Perpatih system.His research focuses on the vanishing culture in Adat Perpatih based on the social, political and economic system.Thus, the categorization of customary sayings according to domain was not systematically conducted.Other weaknesses are both researchers, Selat and Ibrahim only used a few examples of customary saying in their discussions.Such studies are not comprehensive in nature, and the interpretation is somewhat limited to a specific example.
This study uses a new perspective in the language usage, i.e. considering the relevant association patterns.In this context, association patterns refer to the quantitative data, which will be linked to the interpretation (qualitative), which is the basic step in a corpus-based study (Biber, Conrad & Reppen, 1998).In other words, this study not only reports the frequencies of lexicon, but also explains the meaning of such lexicon in the corpus.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
As described above, the domain in this study pertains to the use of lexical criteria as the focus, i.e. the content words and function words.The content words refer to the main words in the grammar, namely nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.While the function words refer to those which carry only grammatical meanings, namely conjunctions, relative pronouns and prepositions.
This study has identified the customary words in the content and function words list.The category of the customary words was done based on the book written by Ibrahim (2003) entitled Glossary of Negeri Sembilan Custom.
He has documented almost 2600 Adat Perpatih's terms, sorted in alphabetical order.The terms collected consist of words, phrases, expressions, compounds and plural noun.For example: (1) Alam beraja Luak berpenghulu Suku berlembaga Anak buah berbuapak Orang semenda bertempat semenda The state has a ruler The district has a territorial chief The clan has a clan chief The sub-clan has an elder The affined has affinal relative(s) The above example (1) places the areas of governance of the head of custom, through the word luak (state), penghulu (territorial chief), suku (clan) and buapak.All these words are associated with the political system or hierarchy which exists in the Adat Perpatih starting from highest to lowest.In Adat Perpatih, the territorial chief is the supreme leader, and he is the head of a luak (state).The territorial chief is appointed by the chief of the clan that is the lembaga (clan head), followed by buapak, which has its own affine.This lexicon shares the same semantic domain, namely the same political system.Therefore, this lexicon is categorized as the political domain.

Customary leader
The social domain refers to the social events in the Adat Perpatih community.A total of customary sayings data about marriage customs, family and advice are categorized in the social domain.
Based on observations, most of the customary sayings' data evolved on marriage rules or marriage law in Adat Perpatih.This will be discussed in the next section.The economic domain refers to any activities related to the cause of obtaining sustenance for the survival of Adat Perpatih community.This includes the management of environmental resources, such as land, crops and livestock.
A Comparison of the Content and Function Words.Biber (2011) states that a corpus-based study is intended to obtain lexical distributions based on the analysis of 'keywords'.There are three keywords in this study, namely, content words, function words and customary Copyright © 2018, IJAL, EISSN 2502-6747 words.The discussion in this section focuses on the distribution of content words and function words in the corpus based on the domain of the study.Further, it will identify and describe the meaning of customary words in each domain stated.
As a whole, this corpus study consists of 41.764 words.The number is big compared to the previous researchers who studied only a few verses of the customary sayings as examples of their studies.A comparison of the total number of domain words showed that the social domain is most dominant with 34,162 words, followed by the political domain with 7482 words, and the economic domains of only 120 words.Table 1 shows the distribution"s presentation and description of the content words and function words for the whole data of the study.Table 1 displays the top 10 words for content words and function words.The word datuk and adat (custom) registered the highest frequency at 730 and 592.The next two words, sembah (obeisance) and orang (person) had a total of over 400 times.The word kata (word) and anak buah (affine) registered the usage of exceeding 300 times.The word semenda, tempat (place) and janji (promise) exceeded 200 times.The last one is the word mati (die) as much as 167 frequencies.From the list, 7 words are included in the noun, while 3 are verb (sembah, janji, mati).
The function words show that the relative pronouns of nan and yang (as) registered the highest total number of 1422 times (over 30%).The word kok (if) is the third highest.The prepositions di (at) and ke (to) have high frequencies of occurrence exceeding 400 times.They are followed by sama (same) and the negative conjunctive tak (no), exceeding 300 times.The last three words are the preposition pada (at), dek (because) and dan (and).Based on this list, preposition registered the highest usage, a total of five words, di, ke, sama, pada, dek (at, to, same.because).Followed by 2 relative pronouns nan, yang (which) while the adverb word kok (if), negative conjunctive tak (no) and the conjunction dan (and) once of each respectively.
Based on the list of customary words in the Negeri Sembilan Custom's Glossary by Ibrahim (2003), there are 8 words in the content word category that is, the customary words which registered a percentage of 83.8%.While only 3 function words namely, nan, kok and dek (which, if, because) are in the customary word category (36.9%) respectively.These findings indicate that the usage of customary words is more common in the content word category.

Social Domain
On the whole, the social domain registered the most number of lexical than the political and economic domains (see Table 2).This gives the impression that customary sayings are highlighting more of the social aspects.It is noted that the usage of content words and function words for social domain is not much different from the overall data in table 1.Only function words show a slight difference due to the absent of the word dek (because).The word datuk and adat (custom) still registered the highest number of frequency.Similarly, to the word nan and yang (as) for the function words.
Copyright © 2018, IJAL, EISSN 2502-6747 The discussion in this section focuses on the lexical meaning used in the social domain based on the corpus.For example, the word Datuk which was used the most has a few references.In the Negeri Sembilan Custom Glossaries, Ibrahim, (2003) divides at least three meanings of datuk, namely: i) the noble person, (ii) the father of a person"s father, (iii) title of the Customary Head with the level of Undang, Territorial chief, Clan Head and Buapak.Based on the meanings stated here, the third meaning of datuk is most suitable for the Adat Perpatih system.For example, (2) Menjemput anak buah Datuk Inviting the Datuk's affine The example above uses a special name for the word Datuk.Almost all of the entire data wrote the word Datuk with a proper noun.This shows the impression that the word Datuk refers to a title or a particular name related to the Adat Perpatih system.Part of the data also used the phrase anak buah Datuk (Datuk's affine).In this context, anak buah (affine) refers to a member or members of the family cluster headed by the Datuk.In the Adat Perpatih system, Datuk refers to the territorial chief or it also refers to custom Datuk or the custom head in an area.
On the other hand, customary lexical refers directly to the rules, law or the law of the Adat Perpatih system.It is anticipated that the usage of adat (custom) word is one of the most used, particularly in the social and political domains because both domains are more likely implying the regulation.Typical words in sayings which uses the adat (custom) word are: (3) Adat bersendikan hukum Custom is articulated by the Law Asserted in the example above, the customs practiced among the customary community is in accordance with the Islamic law or religion.This is true in the social domain, for example, the customary marriage.Marriage is part of the rules of life.The Adat Perpatih community appreciates living together (Selat, 1975).Thus, customary sayings were made as a tool for describing marriage customs.
The data show that the word orang (person) as the fourth highest in the social domain.Basically, the word orang (person) is general in nature, namely referring to the community.The data shows that orang tua (elderly affine) and orang muda (young affine) refer to the different social groups.The word Orang semenda (semenda person) was also found in the data.In Adat Perpatih, the word Orang semenda (semenda person) refers to the affine who come into the clan other than his clan through marriage (Manaf, 2015).In the Adat Perpatih system, the men are required to live in the wife's area (matrilineal).
The anak buah (affine) lexical is often associated with one of the clan's name.The phrase anak buah (affine) refers to a member (i) a territorial chief/undang; the affine or the population of the entire luak (ii) to the Clan head: clan's members lead regardless of their places of residence.(iii) to Buapak: Members of the perut are led regardless of their places of residence (iv) Besar: Members of an area are led regardless of their places of residence (v) to Kadim: members of a place are led regardless of their places of residence.

Political Domain
The following discussion and Table 3 show the statistics for political domain based on the overall data of the study.Similar to the social domain, the content word in the political domain likely to be used is the word adat (custom) with the highest frequency of 183 times (30%).The word orang (person) is the second highest registered at 67 times (11.1%).The word kata (word) and anak buah (affine), each of which, amounts to almost the same total number.They are followed by the words datuk and tempat (place), which are the same total number of 52 times (8.5%).The word raja (King) occurred 39 times (6.4%), which is not much different from the last 3 words, namely sembah, mati dan tanah (obeisance, death, land).
In the leadership context, customary sayings reveal that every member of the society has their respective roles.For example, (4) Adat berkampung, kampung pertahankan Adat bernegeri, negeri pertahankan Adat berpemimpin, pemimpin pertahankan Copyright © 2018, IJAL, EISSN 2502-6747 The norm of a village, the village must be defended The norm of a state, the state must be defended The norm of having a leader, the leaders need to defend Example (4) above explains that custom functions in various contexts, i.e. as the norm of a village, the village should be defended.As the norm of a state, then the state must be defended, if there is a leader then the leader should defend.If the custom is in the leadership context, then the appointed leader needs to defend.The adat (custom) lexical in the political domain is often associated with the custom"s chief or leader according to the order.For example, (5) Raja berkeadilan, Penghulu / undang ibu adat, Lembaga yang punya adat, Buapak menjalankan adat, Orang semenda menjaga dan memelihara adat, Anak buah memakai adat.
A just King, The Territorial chief/Undang is the 'mother of the custom', The Clan head owns the custom, Buapak implement the custom, The semenda affine keep and maintain the custom, The affine practice the custom.
The above sayings show that the King functions as a judge or referred to as 'justice'.In the Adat Perpatih, the King has no power over any customary luak in Negeri Sembilan except within his area namely, Seri Menanti which is specified for him.Seri Menanti is the Royal Town of Negeri Sembilan, which is also the place of residence for the Yang Di-Pertuan Besar of Negeri Sembilan.The King or Yang di-Pertuan Besar is only a symbol of justice and functions to preserve unity in Negeri Sembilan.On the other hand, the territorial chief is the highest head or leader of the custom.Therefore, it is referred to as the 'mother of the custom'.The clan head is the leader of a kinship group called clan.It is followed by a buapak as the head for the group called the perut (sub-clan).Buapak is appointed through consensus by the affines and agreed by the Lembaga (clan head).Therefore, buapak serves as a custom implementer.The semenda affine is assigned to take care of the custom, and the affines are as the custom"s practitioners.
Similar to the social domain, function words for the political domain has almost the same pattern.The different is that the word di (at) registered the highest frequency of 132 times (15.0%)respectively, followed by two function words, ke (to) and yang (as), with the same frequency of 118 times (13.3%).The word nang occurred 113 times (12.8%) compared to the word nan which occurred 64 times (7.2%) respectively.Both these words are different in form but have the same function.Other function words, such as kok (if)), pada (on) and tak (no), amount to 70-78 times.Finally, the word dek (because) and sama (same) occcurred 65 times (7.4%) and 52 times (5.9%).
Based on the corpus, the conjunction di (at) and ke (to) serve to indicate a place, for example: (6) Raja bertitah di istananya Penghulu berundang di balainya

The King utters in his castle
The territorial chief practice in his court (7) Ke bukit sama didaki Ke lurah sama dituruni

To the hill together we climb To the valley together we descend
Example (6) describes that the King will utter his command in the palace, while the territorial chief will implement the law in his court.Example (7) shows the concept of consensus in the society, namely enduring the hardship together.Similar to di (at), the word ke (to) functions to show a place, to the hill (a high place) and to the valley (a low place).
The interesting conjunction words to be discussed here are the relative pronoun variations nang, yang and nan (as).Following are examples of the usage of all the relative pronouns in the data: The examples above show that the words nang, nan and yang (as) differ only in the form but have the same function which can be mutually replaced in sentences.For example, nang in example (8) can be replaced with nan and yang.Based on research, this study found that the word nang is an influence from the Minangkabau language.However, this is not surprising because the Adat Perpatih system originates from Minangkabau (Ibrahim 1993).Subsequently, it was discovered that although the forms are alternate, the corpus shows that only the elements of yang and nan can be present at the beginning of a sentence.This reveals that the usage of the word nang is restricted as a relative pronoun in a sentence.
Further discussion on the function word kok (if) and dek (because), which is included in the category of customary words.For example: If it is the elderly is respected If it is the youngsters are loved (12) Adat yang tak lapuk dek hujan Tak lekang dek panas

An ever-enduring custom
Both the words kok (if) and dek (because) belong to the Negeri Sembilan dialect style of pronunciation.In the Malay language, the standard word kok (if) means kalau, while the word dek (because) refers to oleh (by) or kerana (because).Based on example (11) the word kok (if) should be replaced with the conjunction word kalau (if), while the word dek (because) can be replaced with the conjunction kerana (as).The meaning of sayings in example ( 11) is that both the young and old must respect each other, while example (12) insists that the custom practiced is suitable at all times.One reason is that the Adat Perpatih as aforementioned is based on the Islamic law.However, the data of this study show that the word kok (if) is only present at the beginning of a sentence, while the word dek (because) is in the middle of the sentence.In other words, the word kok (if) is used at the beginning of a sentence, and the word dek (because) is used as a conjunction between phrases in a sentence.

Economic Domain
As described, the economic domain is the smallest total amount compared to the two domains above.Based on the examination, the customary sayings are highlighting more of the rules based on the Adat Perpatih community's practices for example, the marriage rules in social domain.On the other hand, the economic domain is more focused on the Adat Perpatih"s economic activities for example, agriculture.Table 4 displays the presentation of the frequency data of content words and function words in the economic domain.The use of content words in the economic domain shows a significant difference compared to the political and social domains.For example, based on table 3, none of the lexical is the same as the two previous domains.A comparison of the total number of words was found to be insignificant because the frequency is only between 2 and 4. Likewise, the function words occurred with the frequency of 1 to 7. From the words" class aspect, a large number of the content words are nouns, except the adjective word elok (nice), and the verb hilang (lost) and berarak (scud).Although their numbers are small, it was detected that some words are associated directly with the customary words, for example air (water), emas (gold), majlis (council) and bangsa (race).These words are used as metaphors taken from the environment surrounding the Adat Perpatih community.Although the word padi (paddy) is not included in the customary words, yet it is significant as an economic source of the Adat Perpatih community and is an essential component in the customary inheritance (Ibrahim, 2010).It is similar to the word air (water) which helps in the process of paddy planting.

Comparison of Customary Words According to Domain
In this section, the use of customary words according to domain is discussed.The comparison will show the dominant form of customary words involving the content and function words (see Table 5 for detailed comparison).
Based on the comparison, the social domain has the highest number of customary words, at 3987, followed by 528 words for the political domain and only 26 words in the economic domain.This is expected because the social domain has the most number of words.
Copyright © 2018, IJAL, EISSN 2502-6747 The social domain shows that the function word nan has the highest percentage of usage at 726 times (18.63%)respectively.In addition, there are also other function words in the customary word category which is the ten highest, namely kok (if), a total of 550 times (14.11%), and dek (because), a total of 202 times (5.18%) respectively.This discovery is surprising because the function words apparently contributed to the formation of the customary sayings.In fact, the function words also have a high number in the political domain, for example nang (as), as many as 57 times (10.79%),kok (if), 52 times (9.84%), dek (because), 36 times (6.81%) and nan (as), 31 times (5.87%).In the economic domain, the two function words are in the 10 highest are dek (because) and nan (as).
If the three domains are examined, the function words were significant in the customary sayings when used in all domains, for example, nan (as) and dek (because).The word kok (if) is used in the social and political domains.While the word nang (as) is only used in the political domain.This has shown interesting lexical usage patterns in the customary sayings studied.
For the content words, there are a number of customary words which are often used in the social and political domains, namely datuk, adat (custom), orang (person), kata (word) and anak buah (affine).The rest of the words such as semenda and janji (promise) are only used in the social domain, while the word tempat (place) was found only in the political domain.In the economic domain, the noun dominated the usage of customary words, namely air (water), emas (gold), majlis (council), hari (day), akar (root) and kain (cloth).Only two verbs are used in this domain namely, beremas (golden) and lenggang (swing).

CONCLUSION
The corpus linguistics approach has successfully managed a large data and thus, systematically describing the customary lexical patterns.With this, the use of computing technology has been beneficial in the study of literature texts.The semantic domain concept has contributed to lexical clustering according to the respective domains.The semantic domain information has facilitated the process of identifying the content words, function words, and customary words.
Each customary word used in the sayings has a value or meaning related to the customary community.Based on all the customary words discussed, customary words are divided into two types, namely, (i) specific customary words and (ii) general customary words.A specific customary word refers to the word that can be directly related to the customary system, such as Datuk, anak buah (affine), adat (custom), semenda, raja (King), majlis (council), kok (if), dek (because), nan and nang(as).Special customary words are found to be accentuating more of the traditional and archaic forms.The general customary words are words which are not directly related to customs, such as orang (person), tempat (place), emas (gold), hari (day), kain (cloth) and akar (root).In terms of statistics, special customary words are more dominantly used compared to the general customary words.
Based on the word class analysis, it was found that the customary words consist both the content and function words.More interestingly is that function words dominate the social and political domains.Analysis of the function words in customary sayings has never been discussed by the previous researchers.The data indicates that the function words are not just grammatically functioning in a sentence.For example, the word kok if, will not only serve as the adverb, but deliberately repeated at the beginning of a line to create an aesthetics effect through parallelism elements, with the local style pronunciation.On the other hand, the word kok (if), dek (because), and nan/nang (as) show the existence of the local dialect influence (Negeri Sembilan dialect) and Minangkabau dialects.Therefore, it is not surprising that function words are also the traditional words or part of the customary words.
Analysis of the meaning shows that customary words can be categorized into three, namely, peoples" name (Datuk, orang person, anak buah affine and semenda), abstract nouns (adat custom, majlis council and hari day) and object nouns (akar root, kain cloth, emas gold and air water).
This case provides an overview of the customary words making use of all language elements existing in the environment and culture which surrounds Adat Perpatih.

Figure 1 :
Figure 1: The structure of political leaders in Adat Perpatih.

( 8 )
Susun jari nang sepuluh Angkat sembah pada Datuk Kampung nang bersudut Sawah nang berlopak The ten fingers are arranged Obeisance the Datuk Village with corners Paddy fields with puddles (9) Kok nan banyak ditambah Kok nan lebih dicari If it is a lot it will be added If it is more keep seeking (10) Yang buruk diperbaharui Yang usang diganti The old one is refurbished The dilapidated is replaced

Table 1 .
The overall frequencies of content words and function words

Table 2 :
Frequency of content words and function words in the social domain

Table 3 :
Frequency of content words and function words in the political domain

Table 4 .
Frequency of content words and function words in the economic domain

Table 5 .
Frequency of customary words according to domain