Linguistics and Structuralism Essay

Structuralism is a climate of idea and a method of analysis practiced in 20th-century kindly sciences and humanities it focuses on recurring patterns of thought and deportment ? it seeks to analyse mixer relationships in terms of highly abstract relational structures. Structuralism is intelligibly antithetic from that applied to Radcliffe-Brown? it involves more the bio and psychological aspect of human studies sort of than social structures.Claude Levi-Strauss was the one to pioneer structuralism he suggested that cultural phenomena much(prenominal) as myths, art, kinship systems and language display certain ordered patterns or structures.With these, he believed that the structure of the human mind could be revealed. He good that behind the show up of individual cultures there must exist instinctive properties common to us all innate structures universal proposition to all man. Levi-Strauss focussed his attention on the patterns or structures existing beneath the custo ms and beliefs of all cultures. Methodologically, Strauss drew his models from structural linguistics, analysing forms of social activity as though they were languages.In another(prenominal) words, the things a ordering does, the way pack in this baseball club act, is compargond to language behaviour is acted out unconscious(p)ly as is grammar in the model of language. Therefore, societies differ just as grammar differs between one culture and another, precisely what Levi-Strauss sought was the universal/common structure behind it. He believed that bit the surface phenomenon may vary, the underlying ordering principles are the resembling. Levi-Strauss believed that primary thinking occurs as sets of contrasts. All cultures think in to terms of opposites so as to classify-meaning we must be able to distinguish between things.For example, life, death spirit, personate black, white red, green (stop and go) ? these words alone do not ask much significance they have a meaning and thats it ? basic facts. We take the words as they are by use of outer references from what society acknowledges to it to be.A pen is not an eraser because society has accepted it to be a pen. Levi-Strauss argued that culture is to be understood as a surface phenomenon which reveals the universal human tendency to order and classify experiences and dynamics. He compared peoples language to the?rules that govern society, in that the governed are largely unconscious of what they know.He compared speech the use of sounds and rules, mainly in the form of sentences to the ideas and behaviour that result from the application of largely unconscious social rules. Members of a society are much more likely to be conscious of their existing ideas and behaviours than they are of the deeply structured rules that make these ideas and behaviours possible, but the ideas and behaviours of a habituated group of people, according to Strauss, can only be understood one time the deep structures in their minds can be discover.He says that human responses are largely dissimilar, and that the surface structure is what will consequently show different cultural behaviour. In T. O. K. , we are currently discussing language, mind and meaning ? we covered the same man, Noam Chomsky, the same man mentioned in the book. He pursued the same line of inquiry in linguistics as Strauss. Chomsky believes that the human judgment contains a language system base before birth, but ? goes to reservoir if not stimulated after birth.All babies are programmed to all phonic systems but are channelled into particular language groups on socialization. In other words, a child who has Danish parents will eventually end up speaking Danish unless brought up elsewhere. Structuralism is often criticized for not world able to prove something through hypothesis testing and validation. Strauss makes unprovable assumptions nigh humans, and some people find it hard to believe the concept of universal stru ctures. Structuralism also tends to ahistorical, thus not accounting for the way explanation effects the present.