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structuralism

A more systematic approach to analysing and classifying elements in a language; an attempt to describe sentence structure and elements according to syntactic criteria alone without reference to meaning:

  • explicit discovery procedures for the analysis of language; description of constituents and immediate constituents of sentence structure:

Difficulties:

  • resolving ambiguous sentences such as They can fish. where the ambiguity is semantic in nature.
  • complete separation of structure and meaning is not possible;