Abstract
As a body of work structuralism assumes that social life and meaning are organized by a set of deep structures that frame understanding and perceptions of reality. Social meaning is the product of systematic conceptual structures through which we apprehend reality (→ Structuralism). Structuralism traces its existence to the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who set out his principles on language in hisCourse in general linguistics(published 1959, after his death). Saussure's interest was in the study of language as a system, and he made a distinction betweenlangue(the formal structures of language) andparole(the way language is employed in varied and individuated ways in actual speech). His argument was that while the individual instances of use (parole) may vary, underlying all of them is a formal set of consistent codes and conventions of language (→ Code; Language and Social Interaction).
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