What is ‘structural linguistics’? Do most linguists still accept its principles? Or are they now believed in only by old men, clinging to the ideas that were exciting in their youth? Who, among the scholars who have written on language in the twentieth century, was or is a structuralist? Who, by implication, would that exclude?

It may seem, at the outset, that the first of these questions should be fundamental. We must begin by asking what, in general, we mean by ‘structuralism’. There are or have been ‘structuralists’ in, for example, anthropology; also in other disciplines besides linguistics, such as literary criticism and psychology. What unites them, and distinguishes them from other theorists or practitioners in their fields? In answering this question we will identify a set of general principles that structuralists subscribe to; and, when we have done that, we will be able to ask how they apply to the study of language. From that we will deduce the tenets that a ‘structural linguist’ should hold; we can then see who does or, once upon a time, did hold them. But an inquiry in this form will lead us only into doubt and confusion. For different authorities have defined ‘structuralism’, both in general and in specific application to linguistics, in what are at first sight very different ways. There are also linguists who are structuralists by many of the definitions that have been proposed, but who would themselves most vigorously deny that they are anything of the kind.

Let us look, for a start, at the definitions to be found in general dictionaries. For ‘structuralism’ in general they will often distinguish at least two different senses.