These patterns, Jakobson argues, can be revealed by the linguistic

analysis of a text:
Any unbiased, attentive, exhaustive, total description of the selection,
distribution and interrelation of diverse morphological classes and
syntactic constructions in a given poem surprises the examiner himself
by unexpected, striking symmetries and anti-symmetries, balanced
structures, efficient accumulation of equivalent forms and salient
contrasts, finally by rigid restrictions in the repertory of morphological
and syntactic constituents used in the poem, eliminations
which, on the other hand, permit us to follow the masterly interplay of
the actualized constructions.
(ibid., p. 603)
This striking and optimistic passage suggests that if one follows
patiently the procedures of linguistic analysis – and follows them
mechanically so as to avoid bias – one can produce a complete inventory
of the patterns in a text. The claim seems to be, first, that linguistics
provides an algorithm for exhaustive and unbiased description
of a text and, second, that this algorithm of linguistic description constitutes
a discovery procedure for poetic patterns in that if followed
correctly it will yield an account of the patterns which are objectively
present in the text. These patterns will surprise the analyst himself, but
66 structuralism and linguistic models
since the procedures which revealed them are objective and exhaustive
he can enjoy the surprise of discovery and need not worry about the
status and pertinence of these unexpected results.
There are, however, good reasons for concern. Leaving aside for the
moment the relevance of the patterns discovered in this way, one must
seriously question the claim that linguistics provides a determinate
procedure for exhaustive and unbiased description. A complete grammar
of a language will, of course, assign structural descriptions to every
sentence, and if the grammar is explicit two analysts using it will assign
the same description to a given sentence; but once one goes beyond
this stage and undertakes a distributional analysis of a text, one enters a
realm of extraordinary freedom, where a grammar, however explicit,
no longer provides a determinate method. One can produce distributional
categories almost ad libitum. One might, for example, begin by
studying the distribution of substantives and distinguish between those
which were objects of verbs and those which were subjects. Going one
step further, one might distinguish between those