martes, 29 de noviembre de 2011

The Copenhagen School

The Copenhagen School, officially the "Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague)", was a group of scholars dedicated to the study of structural linguistics founded by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal. In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and thePrague School.




Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics

In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structural theory of language which he called glossematics, which developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure.

His first major book, Principes de grammaire générale, which he finished in 1928, is an invaluable source for anyone interested in Hjelmslev's work. During the 1930s Hjelmslev wrote another book, La catégorie des cas, which was a major contribution to linguistics. In this book, Hjelmslev analysed the general category of case in detail, providing ample empirical material supporting his hypotheses.

His most well-known book, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse, or in English translation, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, first published in 1943, critiques the then-prevailing methodologies in linguistics as being descriptive, even anecdotal, and not systematising.

Hjelmslev's famously renamed signifier and signified as respectively expression plane and content plane. The combinations of the four would distinguish between form of contentform of expressionsubstance of content, and substance of expression.




Also, his most famous work, Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, is mostly concerned with the formal definition of a terminology for the analysis of any level of a system of signs, and as such there exists an exclusively Hjelmslevian terminology for that.


In one of his last works, “Some Reflexions on Practice and Theory in Structural Semantics” (1961), Hjelmslev even admits that the entire analysis might end up with indefinable of simple behavior situations such as, “I am here, you are there” elements that constitute language as a process of enunciation and not as an immanent structure.

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