Saussure's universal grammar, Chomsky's structuralism

The standard narrative of the development of linguistics in the twentieth century is that the publication of Saussure’s Cours in 1916 initiated a structuralist linguistics that endured until the rise of Chomsky’s transformational- generativism put an end to it. All good historical plots are s implified, and their suppressed complexities eventually demand to be reconsidered. This chapter makes the case that Saussure's linguistics, far from being the mere repertoire of elements depicted by Chomsky, was actually the sort of 'universal grammar' that Chomsky claimed to be replacing it with; and that Chomsky, for all his dismissiveness of structural linguistics as merely taxonomic, was actually the one who brought the main principles of structuralism into American linguistics for the first time.