One of the paradoxes of postmodernity is the fact that in North America, with a plethora of pluralism, there has only been one dominant linguistic paradigm in place for almost 50 years, ultimately based on structuralism. Certainly there have been various European structuralist—linguistic models that could have had a lasting influence on mainstream American linguistics. For example, members of the Prague Linguistic Circle viewed functionalism from a structuralist perspective, and Helmjslev took a structuralist stance within glossematics. Why didn't these and other predominant areas of inquiry have more influence on mainstream American linguistics? It is somewhat ironic that Russian semiotics of the 1920s has caught the imagination of many scholars in various fields, while at the same time it is perceived by some Chomskyan linguists as being a threat to thescientific method.It is interesting to note that in returning to the origins of Saussure there was a vision of language placed within a hierarchical system, with semiotics positioned at the top of the hierarchy. The problem then revolves around an understanding of what semiotics means to linguists. In the case of de Saussure, he did not go on to investigate this field of study within the understanding of historical change. In other words, his model is static in the sense that there are no mechanisms in place to decipher the role of the individual regarding societal change. Various Russian theorists then rejected the Saussurian interpretation of linguistics during the 1920s, such as Bakhtin and Vologinov. For example