Before the development of generative grammar in the late 1950s, linguists focused almost entirely on the smallest units of language: sounds, minimal meaningful elements (“morphemes” like ed, ful, con – see chapter 7 below for more on this notion), and words, where the model of the Saussurian sign has most plausibility. “Syntax” was largely a promissory note to the effect that such sign-based analysis would eventually encompass the larger units of phrases, sentences, etc. Meanwhile, what went by that name was largely a kind of applied morphology: some instructions for what to do with the various kinds of words (inflected and otherwise).