Jan-Ola Östman & Jef Verschueren REVISION in collaboration with Eline Versluys Handbook of Pragmatics 2006 © 2006. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publ. Co STRUCTURALISM J ürgen Van de Walle, Dominique Willems, Klaas Willems 1. Introduction Given the wide range of meanings which the term ‘structuralism’ received in the course of the 20th century, a clear-cut definition of linguistic structuralism is prob- lematical. Strictly speaking, it refers to a set of general principles shared by promi- nent European linguists of the inter-war period who were all deeply influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique g é n érale (Saussure 1995[1916], hereafter CLG). However, it is also customary to refer to American linguistics as practised from the 1930s through the 1950s as ‘structural’, although its theoreti- cal and methodological principles were considerably different from ‘European structuralism’ and Saussure’s influence rather limited. Moreover, several European post-war schools and movements (cf. § 4) are generally seen as falling within the purview of ‘structuralism’ as well. Although they differed in various important methodological issues, they have in common that, contrary to American structural- ism, they were all deeply influenced by the CLG (cf. § 3). Because of this wide range of ‘structuralisms’, it would be erroneous to refer to a single structuralist tradition in linguistics, and in order to be properly understood, both the European and American structuralist traditions in linguistics have partly to be assessed historically (cf. Christmann 1958-1961; Albrecht 2000; Matthews 2001). After outlining the general principles of structuralism as origi- nally conceived in Europe (section 2), this paper focuses (section 3) on its immedi- ate source, Saussure’s CLG, the general principles of European structuralism being chiefly related to various interpretations of this work. In section 4, some of the most