Where does structure collide?

In sociology, structure is the enduring, patterned arrangement of social relations, roles, and institutions that both constrains and enables the conduct of individuals: it is the standing order of a society, relatively independent of any single actor's will, yet reproduced through their recurrent practices. Giddens's 1984 The Constitution of Society set out structuration theory, in which structure and agency are not opposed but mutually constituted, structure being both the medium and the outcome of the practices it organises. The referent is a social regularity that shapes action, described in the language of roles, norms, and institutions, and it is not a molecule's geometry, a layout in memory, or the syntax of a sentence.[1]

Unit

A patterned arrangement of social relations, roles, and institutions that constrains and enables action

Recovery means

Reproduced rather than fixed: recurrent practices continually reconstitute the very structure that constrains them

Measured by

Traced through network position, role and institutional analysis, and patterned regularities in action, rather than observed directly

In chemistry, structure is the three-dimensional arrangement of atoms and chemical bonds within a molecule: the geometry of bond lengths, bond angles, and torsions that fixes how the molecule behaves and reacts. Wüthrich's 2001 The way to NMR structures of proteins described how nuclear magnetic resonance recovers this arrangement in solution from measured interatomic distances and couplings, complementing the atomic coordinates obtained by X-ray crystallography. The referent is a physical spatial configuration of matter, given as atomic coordinates in ångströms, and it has nothing in common with a social order, a data layout, or a grammatical tree beyond the shared word.[2]

Unit

The three-dimensional arrangement of atoms and bonds in a molecule, as atomic coordinates

Recovery means

A flexible molecule samples many conformations and can refold to its native structure after a perturbation is removed

Measured by

Determined by X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy, which resolve atomic coordinates and interatomic distances

In computer science, a structure is a way of organising data in a computer's memory so that it can be stored and manipulated efficiently: arrays, linked lists, trees, and hash tables are data structures, each pairing a logical arrangement with a set of operations and their costs. Wirth's 1976 Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs treated the choice of data structure as inseparable from the algorithm that acts on it, a founding text of structured programming. The referent is a designed, abstract arrangement of information, judged by the time and space its operations require, and it is unrelated to a society's institutions, a molecule's geometry, or a sentence's syntax.[3]

Unit

A scheme for organising data in memory, such as an array, tree, or hash table

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Characterised by the time and space cost of its operations, in asymptotic bounds for access, insertion, and deletion

In linguistics, syntactic structure is the hierarchical, constituent organisation of a sentence: words group into phrases and phrases into larger phrases, so that a sentence is not a flat string but a nested tree whose branchings determine how it is interpreted. Chomsky's 1957 Syntactic Structures introduced generative phrase-structure and transformational rules, and his 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax drew the distinction between an abstract deep structure and the surface structure that is actually pronounced. The referent is a grammatical constituent hierarchy, represented as a phrase-structure tree, and it shares only its spelling with a social order, a molecular geometry, or a layout in memory.[4][5]

Unit

The hierarchical constituent organisation of a sentence, as a phrase-structure tree

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Inferred from constituency and grammaticality judgements, and represented as a labelled phrase-structure tree