ABSTRACT
Among the social sciences, linguistics has often appeared to have made most progress in attaining the status of a true science. Since Saussure distinguished between langue (language) and parole (speech), identifying the phoneme as the basic building block of every natural language (Saussure 1916), linguistics has provided the model for a whole range of other structuralisms, from anthropology to psycho-analysis. In Structural anthropology (1963), for example, Lévi-Strauss makes some extravagant claims for the scientific status of linguistic analysis. It is, he says, probably the only social science which can truly claim to be a science having achieved the formulation of an empirical method and an understanding of the nature of its data (ibid. p.31).
