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the smallest possible units of [[signification]] within a [[language|language system]] (or [[wp:myth]])
the smallest unit of signification in myths ; building block of structural anthropology.
Term used occasionally in a structuralist context.
=====Phoneme=====
<!-- (analogous to *phoneme) -->
[[Lévi-Strauss]] coined the neologism by analogy to the phoneme (being the smallest unit of speech that can distinguish one statement from another statement, like the "d" versus the "b" in dog/bog). It's a faulty but useful analogy. It's faulty because a phoneme is itself meaningless, whereas a mytheme (understood as a sort of primary element of the mythic story) can be an event, for example, which is not meaningless in itself. It's useful because once the mythemes are identified, they can be aligned with other mythemes in particular kinds of arrangements (to other mythemes in time [diachronic] or to other mythemes in the same myth [synchronic], and so on). These arrangements are structures, hence the term "structuralism" to describe the overall process. Isolating the structures can reveal interesting things that have to do with many things from sociology to psychology.
Talk:Mytheme moved to Talk:Mythème
The ''[[mytheme]]'' is term used by [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]] to describe the
by analogy with [[phoneme]], and used to describe the elementary units employed in the [[structuralism|structural analysis]] of [[wp:myth]]s.
<!-- Term used occasionally in a structuralist context. -->
<!-- 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). -->
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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 [[Category:StructuralismSaussure]]'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.-->
