No wonder ‘structure’ has become the rallying sign of contemporary descriptivist. It points, of course, to a coherence of the components, but, at the same time, to the aloofness of the whole form of the rest.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.3

The realistic conception of linguistic structure as a feature of linguistic reality is apt to be mistaken for the naïve assumption that all that is physically present in speech is part of that reality, irrespective of whether it has a function and what that function is. Actually, structure can be found in language only, as it were, as an aspect of its functioning.
- Martinet (1962), a pag.5