Not long ago, the author of a review of the recent German edition of Hjelmslev's major work, the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, queried the need for the translation by asking whether Hjelmslev ought still to be read in linguistics courses (Kotschi, 1977). No clearer indication could be found of the disrepute into which glossematics, as an important school of European structuralism, has fallen. This general tendency, however, (to which the linguistics of Greimas stands as perhaps the only exception) ought to be combated on two grounds.