never referred to Saussure and often didn't even read him. Zellig Harris took distributionalist ideas even further, claiming that "the structures of language can be described only in terms of the formal, not the semantic, differences of its units and their relations", operationalizing the meaning consideration into the techniques like 'paired utterance test' for distinguishing phonemic contrasts where reference to meaning was unavoidable.

The strongest link between American and European structuralists was phonology (most commonly called