24,656
edits
Changes
no edit summary
<!-- Levi-Strauss's famous article on the matter is "The Structural Study of Myth," in Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. Schoepf (Doubleday, 1967). -->
<!--
The cataloguer of folk tales [[Vladimir Propp]] considered that the unit of analysis was the individual tale: the unitary mytheme by contrast is the equivalent in myth of the [[wp:phoneme]]s, [[wp:morpheme]]s and [[wp:sememe]]s into which [[Linguistics|structural linguistics]] divides language: the smallest possible units of meaning within a language system.
Like [[Saussure]]'s [[sign]]s, [[mytheme]] are created by binary or ternary oppositions and are analogous with the functions identified by [[Propp]] in his morphology of the folk tale. [[Mytheme]]s are to be identified with functions, and not with the characters of mythical tales.
-->
