ABSTRACT
We can often see an approach dissociating itself from the one(s) just before it, while approving one or more earlier ones. The mentalist descriptive linguistics of continental European structuralism spearheaded by Saussure turned against philology so emphatically that 'traditional grammar' , though admittedly 'unscientific', was judged more 'correct' and 'less open to criticism' (2.6). The physicalist descriptive linguistics of American structuralism inaugurated by Bloomfield repudiated mentalism, which 'still prevailed' 'among men of science', and which he grouped together with the outlook of 'grammarians' in 'our school tradition'; in exchange, philology was lauded as 'one of the most successful' 'enterprises' 'of European science in the nineteenth century', one that 'replaced speculation' 'with scientific induction' (4.4f, 8, 73, 76). In turn, Chomsky rebuked Bloomfieldian descriptive structuralism as 'fundamentally inadequate' and gave a high appraisal both to 'mentalism' and to 'traditional grammar', which he also
associated with each other (d. 7.5, 7, 34, 37, to, 4). His own 'generativism' was in its turn reprimanded by van Dijk and Kintsch's cognitive approach, which in exchange saluted linguistic 'Structuralism' and 'Formalism', along with 'classical poetics and rhetoric', and even 'literary scholarship' (to.lf, 58).4
