Editing Structuralism (section)

=== Prague School ===
In France, [[Antoine Meillet]] and [[Émile Benveniste]] continued Saussure's project, and members of the [[Prague linguistic circle|Prague school]] of linguistics such as [[Roman Jakobson]] and [[Nikolai Trubetzkoy]] conducted influential research. The clearest and most important example of Prague school structuralism lies in [[phonemics]]. Rather than simply compiling a list of which sounds occur in a language, the Prague school examined how they were related. They determined that the inventory of sounds in a language could be analysed as a series of contrasts. 

Thus, in English, the sounds /p/ and /b/ represent distinct [[phonemes]] because there are cases ([[minimal pair|''minimal pairs'']]) where the contrast between the two is the only difference between two distinct words (e.g. 'pat' and 'bat'). Analyzing sounds in terms of [[Contrastive distribution|contrastive features]] also opens up comparative scope—for instance, it makes clear the difficulty [[Japanese language|Japanese]] speakers have differentiating /r/ and /l/ in [[English language|English]] and other languages is because these sounds are not contrastive in Japanese. [[Phonology]] would become the paradigmatic basis for structuralism in a number of different fields.

Based on the Prague school concept, André Martinet in France, [[John Rupert Firth|J. R. Firth]] in the UK and [[Louis Hjelmslev]] in Denmark developed their own versions of structural and [[functional linguistics]].