By the latter half of the 20th century, many of Saussure s ideas were
under heavy criticism. His linguistic ideas are now generally considered
important in their time, but outdated and superseded by developments such as cognitive linguistics.
In 1972, Chomsky described structural linguistics as an "impoverished and
thoroughly inadequate conception of language," while in 1984, Marcus
Mitchell declared that structural linguistics were "fundamentally inadequate
to process the full range of natural language [and furthermore were] held by
no current researchers, to my knowledge. Holland writes that it was widely
accepted that Chomsky had "decisively refuted Saussure. [...] Much of
Chomsky s work is not accepted by other linguists [and] I am not claiming that
Chomsky is right, only that Chomsky has proven that Saussure is wrong.
Linguists who reject Chomsky claim to be going beyond Chomsky, or they cling tophrase-structure
grammars. They are not turning back to Saussure."
In the 1950s as structural linguistics were fading in importance in
linguistics, Saussure s ideas were appropriated by several prominent figures incontinental philosophy,
and from there were borrowed in literary theory, where they are used to interpret
novels and other texts. However, several critics have charged that Saussure s
ideas have been misunderstood or deliberately distorted by continental
philosophers and literary theorists. For example, Searlenotes that, in developing his "deconstruction" method, Jacques Derrida altered the truth value of one of Saussure s key concepts:
"The correct claim that the elements of the language only function as
elements because of the differences they have from one another is converted
into the false claim that the elements [...] are "constituted on"
(Derrida) the traces of these other elements."