The author of the article analyzes some contributions of two of the most prominent linguists of the 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky, from a paradigmatic viewpoint of science. The main statement supported here is the evidence, yielded by these contributions, which confirms that linguistics is a mature science in the study of the structure of human language, and also, that there existed a scientific community whose origins account for what could be called the prehistory of linguistics. The author employs for this purpose an argumentative chain which is focused on some core concepts as proposed by Thomas Kuhn in his book La Estructura de las Revoluciones Cientificas.