The goal of this study is to demonstrate the validity and current relevance of the epistemological foundations of structuralism. It will focus on the dictionary Les Verbes français (French Verbs), by J. Dubois & F. Dubois-Charlier (2004) as an exemplar of this theory of the object and of the methodology it implements. This dictionary is based on four postulates which characterize the works stemming from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de Linguistique générale: (1) the need for comprehensive empirical coverage ; (2) the relevance of formal properties (both morphological and syntactic) and of lexical (distributional) properties for semantic classification on account of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (that is, the autonomy of the linguistic system in relation to the world and thought) and the correlated indissoluble association of the signifier and the signified ; (3) the conception of the classification of the whole of the object as a theory, that is, a hypothesized abstract organization whose predictions and explanations are verifiable ; (4) the consideration of the resulting model as a hypothetical construction reflecting the knowledge and options of the scholars of the time, without any pretension to reveal the laws of the workings of the world or of thought (apart from those apprehended by the language itself).