structuralism

a distinctive, yet extremely wide range of productive research conducted in the social sciences from the 150s through the 1970s principally in France. Deriving it’s principles from de Saussere, the founder of structural linguistics. Arguing against the prevailing historicist and philological approaches to linguistics, he proposed a scientific model of language, one understood as a closed system of elements and rules that account for the production and the social communication of meaning. Saussere viewed language as the repository of discursive signs shared by a given linguistic community. The particular sign is composed of two elements, a phonemic signifier, or distinctive sound element, and a corresponding meaning, or signified element. Arbitrariness of the sign is based on a convention. What lends specificity or identity to each particular signifier is its differential relation to the other signifiers in the greater set; hence, each basic unit of language is itself the product of differences between other elements within the system. For Saussere, the closed set of signs is governed by a system of grammatical, phonemic, and syntactic rules. Language thus derives its significance from its own autonomous organization, and this serves to guarantee its communicative function.

"visual dictionary"