Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

‘But which is the stone that supports the bridge?’ Kublai Khan asks.

‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’

Marco answers, ‘but by the line of the arch that they form.’

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: ‘

Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.’

Polo answers: ‘Without stones there is no arch.’

         (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972, p. 82)

Much of the motivation for extending structural analysis beyond language, from the standpoint of linguistics, is not to assimilate the rest of culture to language, but to discover more precisely the place of language.

Dell Hymes, Proceedings of the Colloque Internationale du C.N.R.S., L’emploi des calculateurs en archéologie, problèmes sémiologiques et mathématiques, Marseilles, April 1969