Faculty of Humanities and Social Science > English
Why theory?
Gopa B. Caesar:
An example
Three characters: princess, stepmother, and prince
A princess is persecuted by a stepmother and rescued (and married) by a prince
ex. Cinderella
“units†are:princess, stepmother, and prince
"rules" are: stepmothers are evil, princesses are victims, and princes and princesses have to marry.
Structuralism analyses the relationship between units and rules.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Structuralist notions on units and rules
Structuralists believe that the underlying structures which organize units and rules into meaningful systems are generated by the human mind itself, and not by sense perception.
As such, the mind is itself a structuring mechanism which looks through units and files them according to rules.
So structuralism sees itself as a science of humankind, and works to uncover all the structures that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel
Gopa B. Caesar:
Structuralist Analysis Posits These Systems as Universal
Every human mind in every culture at every point in history has used some sort of structuring principle to organize and understand cultural phenomena.
Every human culture has some sort of language, which has the basic structure of all language: words/phonemes are combined according to a grammar of rules to produce meaning.
Every human culture similarly has some sort of social organization
All of these organizations are governed, according to structuralism, by structures which are universal.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Structure
A structure is any conceptual system that has the following three properties:
Wholeness:
This means that the system functions as a whole, not just as a collection of independent parts.
Transformation:
This means that the system is not static, but capable of change. New units can enter the system, but when they do they're governed by the rules of the system.
Self-Regulation:
This is related to the idea of transformation. You can add elements to the system, but you can't change the basic structure of the system no matter what you add to it. The transformations of a system never lead to anything outside the system.
Gopa B. Caesar:
Saussure’ ideas on linguistics
I: THE NATURE OF THE LINGUISTIC SIGN
Language is based on a NAMING process, by which things get associated with a word or name.
The linguistic SIGN (a key word) is made of the union of a concept and a sound image. A more common way to define a linguistic SIGN is that a SIGN is the combination of a SIGNIFIER and a SIGNIFIED. Saussure says the sound image is the SIGNIFIER and the concept the SIGNIFIED.
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