| Summary: | After having briefly recalled the context of his meeting with Jakobson in the United States at the beginning of the 40’s, this article tries to identify what fascinated Lévi-Strauss in the recently discovered Troubetskoy and Jakobson’s phonology. Returning to the notion of phoneme makes it possible to identify, based on the instinctive notion of distinctive sound, a conception of language as a system of differences similar to Saussure’s. Such is the origin of the importance granted by Lévi-Strauss to structural oppositions which he thinks organise the kinship as well as the mythologies. Afterwards, some important results of structural analysis in anthropology are recalled (for example, a new conception of symbolism), in order to evoke the critical impact of Chomsky’s linguistics on this conception of links existing between linguistics and anthropology.
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