This book is a concise historical analysis of Structural Linguistics, tracking its development from the 1970s to the present day. In it, it is explained what we understand by structuralism and why structuralist ideas still occupy a prominent place in the field of Linguistics today. For the structuralists, language is an autonomous and highly organized system, whose history would be that of a set of successive changes from one state of the system to a different one. This idea has its origins in the 19th century and was developed in the 20th by Saussure and his disciples, including the linguists who made up the school led by Bloomfield in the United States. Thanks, in particular, to the work of Chomsky, structuralism has retained much of the influence it once had. In this book, Peter Matthews examines its beginnings and analyzes the fundamental role it played in the study of the sound systems of languages ​​and the problems inherent in the changes experienced by these systems. Matthews discusses the various theories put forward about the global structure of languages, but also the «Chomskyan revolution», which took place in the 1950s, as well as the various structuralist theories that have been proposed about of meaning.