Summary. Recent advances in the quantitative analysis of natural language call for a theoretical framework that explains, how these advances are possible. This helps to unify different approaches and algorithms in quantitative linguistics. We consider the linguistic tradition of structuralism as a basis for such a framework. In what follows, we focus on syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations and attempt to describe them in a coherent way. We present an abstract version of a (neo-)structuralist language model and show how already known algorithms fit into it. We also show how new algorithms can be derived from it. As has already been predicted by linguists like Firth and Harris, it is possible to construct a computational model of language based on linguistic structuralism and statistical mathematics. The model we propose specifically helps to explain fully unsupervised algorithms for natural language processing which are based on well known methods like co-occurrence measures and clustering.