Barthes’s book S/Z published in 1970. He here analyses a short story and classifies using five ‘codes’, seeing these as the basic underlying structures of all narratives. These five codes are:

The proairetic code: This code provides indications of actions.

            The hermeneutic code: This code poses questions or enigmas which provide narrative suspense.

            The cultural code: This code contains references out beyond the text to what is regarded as common knowledge.

            The semic code: It is linked to theme, and this code when organised around a particular proper name constitutes a ‘character’.

            The symbolic code: This code is also linked to theme, but on a larger scale, so to speak. It consists of contrasts and pairings related to the most basic binary polarities – male and female, night and day, good and evil, life and art, and so on.

            In his later writings, Barthes abandoned the scientific aspiration of structuralism, and distinguished between the “readerly” text such as the realistic novel that tries to “close” interpretation by insisting on specific meanings, and the “writerly” text that aims at the ideal of “a galaxy of signifiers,” and so encourages the reader to be a producer of his or her own meanings according not to one code but to a multiplicity of codes.

            Noam Chomsky made another contribution to structuralist theory which is of importance in linguistics and should be mentioned here. He made a distinction between ’surface structures’ and ‘deep structures’. A surface structure consists of the collection of words and sounds that we articulate and hear in a sentence; a deep structure is the abstract and underlying structure in language. A single sentence may have many different surface forms and features and yet have the same meaning. The underlying or deep structure regulates the meaning.

            Other mentionable structuralists are Jonathan Culler and Roman Jakobson.