Mary Douglass and Claude Levi-Strauss discuss the relationship of language’s elements and its overall structure. Structuralism studies deep structure in phenomenon like language with its basic units and the way they’re assembled. Like Freud, they say an important part is the existence of paired opposites, which are pairs of things we usually tend to put together as being relational opposites such as hot and cold or night and day. There are three types of social communication according to Douglass; kinship, economy and language. They argue that if we could compare the structures of these three forms of communication we can truly understand how we think and act as humans in a society. Structuralists say that the relationship between the elements of these are like a myth.
So if we know language is shaped by paired opposites and this form or structure with is pieces, what exactly are they trying to “uncover” or figure out?
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