Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

3.5 Constitutive rather than regulatory rules
Unit 3 Analysing units of structure
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

The rules of what might be called the ’cultural grammars’ proposed by structuralism are often described as ’constitutive’. This means that, as grammatical rules, they are not regulating an already existing system (as rules do that tell you what you must and must not do while driving); instead, they define what can count as allowable within a conventional system that only comes into being at all because of the existence of those rules. It is only by invoking particular conventions or rules of a game of chess or football, or social behaviour such as greeting or eating in a restaurant, that you are able to recognize the activity as whatever you know it to be. The same applies to social institutions such as weddings, birthday parties, money or law.

Structuralism’s descriptions gained much of their power and interest from the possibility they offered of isolating and describing basic structures of how conventional social codes operate. That power of description was often linked to two further claims. The first is the suggestion, made by many thinkers, that the formulation of grammatical rules in terms of layers of often binary oppositions, or oppositions involving a contrast between only two alternative terms, has deep origins in human psychology. The second claim is that the means for describing such systems - considered to be available in linguistic techniques for analysing the grammar of language - would be similar across a very wide range of sign systems.