ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, you have been at great pains to dissociate yourself from ‘structuralism’, or at least from what is ordinarily understood by that term. You have tried to show that you used neither the methods nor the concepts of structuralism; that you make no reference to the procedures of linguistic description; that you are not concerned with formalization. But what do these differences amount to, if not that you have failed to avail yourself of what is most positive, most rigorous, and most revealing in structural analysis? That the domain that you have tried to deal with is not susceptible to this kind of enterprise, and that its richness has constantly eluded the schemata in which you wished to enclose it? And with apparent unconcern, you are now trying to disguise the impotence of your method; you are now presenting as an explicitly intended difference the unconquerable distance that separates you, and will always separate you, from a true structural analysis.
