Ferdinand de Saussure
Structuralism versus generative grammar

Saussure's influence was restricted to American linguistics which was dominated by the advocates of Wilhelm Wundt 's psychological approach to language, especially Leonard Bloomfield (1887–1949). The Bloomfieldian school rejected Saussure's and other structuralists' sociological or even anti-psychological (e.g. Louis Hjelmslev, Lucien Tesnière) approaches to the theory of language. Problematically, the post-Bloomfieldian school was nicknamed 'American structuralism', confusing. Although Bloomfield denounced Wundt's Völkerpsychologie and opted for behavioural psychology in his 1933 textbook Language, he and other American linguists stuck to Wundt's practice of analysing the grammatical object as part of the verb phrase. Since this practice is not semantically motivated, they argued for the disconnectedness of syntax from semantics, thus fully rejecting structuralism.

The question remained why the object should be in the verb phrase, vexing American linguists for decades. The post-Bloomfieldian approach was eventually reformed as a sociobiological framework by Noam Chomsky who argued that linguistics is a cognitive science; and claimed that linguistic structures are the manifestation of a random mutation in the human genome. Advocates of the new school, generative grammar, claim that Saussure's structuralism has been reformed and replaced by Chomsky's modern approach to linguistics. Jan Koster asserts:

French historian and philosopher François Dosse however argues that there have been various misunderstandings. He points out that Chomsky's criticism of 'structuralism' is directed at the Bloomfieldian school and not the proper address of the term; and that structural linguistics is not to be reduced to mere sentence analysis. It is also argued that
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