What a thing says isn’t the same as the pattern that lets it say anything at all.
Two sentences can sound completely different and still share the same underlying structure (“the dog chased the cat” / “the cat was chased by the dog”), or sound almost identical while differing in a structure you only notice once you try to paraphrase them. That underlying pattern — not the surface wording — is what “structure,” in this technical sense, refers to.
The idea has two overlapping 20th-century origins. In linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure argued that a word’s meaning comes entirely from its position in a system of differences from other words, not from any inherent link to the thing it names — language as relationships, not labels. Noam Chomsky later formalised a parallel distinction in syntax between a sentence’s deep structure (its underlying grammatical relations) and its surface structure (how it’s actually spoken), arguing the same deep structure can generate multiple surface forms. In anthropology and literary theory, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes extended the same logic to myths and narratives — a story’s meaning comes from the relations between its structural elements, not from its specific plot.
Source: Saussure, F. de (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. MIT Press. For a contemporary engagement with how faithfully “structuralism” represents Saussure’s own thinking, see Josef, J. (2018). “‘This eternal wanderer’: A non-dogmatic reading of Saussure.” Cahiers de l’ILSL.