If we disregard Wierzbicka's mental syntax, we may well compare her semantic primes to those which were at the core of the mainstream Continental European semantic theories of the 1960s and the 1970s. Usually we trace this semantic feature theory back to Louis Hjelmslev's Prolegomena (Hjelmslev 1963 [1943]). His phonological analysis and his concept of the phoneme became the model for semantic analysis and the concept of the séme, as it quickly became popular in the linguistics of Romance languages. Bernard Pottier combined Hjelmslev's approach with the Prague school of structuralism. He was also the first to call the ‘distinctive semantic features of lexemes’ sémes. This is how he describes the meaning of chair:

Thus meaning can be analysed in terms of differences, through the presence or absence of sémes. It is this focus on difference which grounds this theory in de Saussure's structuralism.

Algirdas Julien Greimas also uses the concept of sémes (Greimas 1983 [1966]: 22ff.). He distinguishes between the presence of a séme, the negation of this presence (‘negative séme’) and a state in which a given theme is neither present nor absent (‘neutral séme’).