This book is a concise history of structural linguistics, charting its development from the 1870s to the present day. It explains what structuralism was and why its ideas are still central today. For structuralists, a language is a self-contained and tightly organized system whose history is of changes from one state of the system to another. This idea has its origins in the 19th century and was developed in the 20th by Saussure and his followers, including the school of Bloomfield in the United States. Through the work of Chomsky, it is still very influential. This book focuses on examining the role of structuralism and analyzes the role it plays in the study of sound systems and the problems of how systems change. He discusses theories of overall structure of a language, the Chomskyan revolution of the 1950s, and the structuralist theories of meaning. The book has eight chapters, including the following: "Languages"; "Sound Systems"; "Diachrony"; "The Architecture of a Language System"; Internalised Language"; "Structural Semantics" and "Structuralism in 2000." An index is included. (Contains 131 references.) (KFT)