According to structuralism, the world consists of two levels; the visible and the invisible. The visible world consists of the „surface phenomena', all the objects, activities and behaviours we observe or participate in. The invisible world consists of the structures that underlie and organize all these phenomena so that they can make sense to us.
For example; the English language consists of countless words. However, millions of speakers of this language use it with ease. How does this happen? The speakers follow a certain structure underlying the language called grammar. The world is also full of innumerable objects. However, we have a way of classifying them so that the world is not chaos.
The concept of structuralism was developed by a Swiss Linguist Ferdinand De Saussure between
1913 and 1915. However his ideas became popular in the 1950's. Before De Saussure, language was studied diachronically (in terms of the history of changes in individual words over time). It was also assumed that words referred to the object for which they stood. These are the two notions De Saussure sought to correct.
First, De Saussure felt that words ought to be studied at a given point in time (synchronically) rather than diachronically i.e. looking at the rules that underlie a language, or a language's structure. He came up with the term „Langue? to refer to the structure of a language, and „parole? to refer to the utterances generated by the language structure. The interest of a structuralist is the ,Langue', or the structure of the language.
De Saussure observed that we recognize the components making up a structure only when we
perceive them to be different from one another. This is to say that the human mind perceives
things in terms of opposites, which structuralists call „binary oppositions’ for example, we
understand good as the opposite of evil, male as the opposite of female, day as the opposite of night etc.
NatalieR answered the question on June 13, 2022 at 12:12