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. The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developing theory of language, glossematics. Together with Viggo Brødal he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle. 

The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developing theory of language, glossematics. Together with Viggo Brødal he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague a group of linguists based on the model of the Prague Linguistic Circle.

Louis Hjelmslev (October 3, 1899, Copenhagen – May 30, 1965, Copenhagen) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family, Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris (with a.o.Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes). In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague.

The basic theoretical framework, called Glossematics was laid out in Hjelmslevs two main works: "Prolegomena to a theory of Language" and "résumé of a theory of Language." 

In 1989 a group of members of the Copenhagen Linguistic circle inspired by the advances in cognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories of Simon C. Dik founded the School of Danish Functional Grammar aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brøndal, and other important Danish linguists such as Paul Diderichsen and Otto Jespersen with modern functional linguistics.

žHis 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.

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

Hjelmslev introduced the terms glosseme, ceneme, prosodome, and pleremeas linguistic units, analogous to phoneme, morpheme, etc. 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 his general grammar, Hjelmslev tries to articulate the basic principles for a description of language as form. The grammar itself is a system of forms from which the specific forms of any natural language can be generated. 

Hjelmslev's importance in semiotics is a result of his rigorous attempt to turn Saussure's heterogenous and somewhat flexible structuralism into a theory of maximal explicitness and conceptual homogeneity on all levels. Moreover, his willingness to reconsider, albeit somewhat reluctantly, the formal limits of his theory sets the standard for any serious semiotic research.