Although the neogrammarian framework still remains the basis of historical linguistics, various aspects of it have undergone modification since its inception a hundred years ago. The first major development in linguistics which was to challenge the neogrammarian position was the application of structuralist principles to the analysis of language. The structuralist approach, the origin of which is usually traced to the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, was developed in Europe principally by the members of the Prague school and in America by the Bloom-fieldians (Robins 1967: 198ff.) and varieties of it, under the label ‘taxonomic linguistics’, still constitute the major alternative to transformational-generative linguistics. For the structuralist a language is to be seen as an integrated whole, un système où tout se tient, that is to say a system in which each unit is defined by its place in the overall network of oppositions. This applies equally to all languages, including related ones and even the successive states of one and the same language.

The realization that each language has its own independent structure, a fact which had not been explicitly stated by the neogrammarians, demanded a new attitude towards historical linguistics. With the insight provided by this new structuralist approach neogrammarian ‘atomism’, the tracing through successive language states of individual sound segments and of grammatical or lexical forms without any attempt to make explicit at each stage their status in the synchronic system, was no longer acceptable.