The Copenhagen School

The Copenhage School

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.

The Prague School

The Prague School

Roman Jackobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University.

As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century.
Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology.

He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language).

Jakobson is a phonological Tory. For him, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role.

Functions of Language

Trubetzkoy

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Russian; Moscow, April 16, 1890 - Vienna, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology.

Trubetzkoy, like other members of the Prague School, was well aware that the functions of speech are not limited to the expression of an explicit message.

A phonetic opposition which fulfils the representation function will normally be a phonetic contrast; but distinctions between the allophones of a given phoneme, where the choice is not determinated by the phonemic

environment, often play an expressive or conative role. 

A manifestation of Prague attitude that language is a tool which has a job to do the fact that members of that School were much preocupied with the aesthetic, literary aspects of language use.

Functional Linguistcs: the Prague School

                             Prague school, school of linguistic thought and analysis           

established in Prague in the 1920s by Vilém Mathesius

Nikolay Trubetskoy and the Russian-born American linguist Roman Jakobson; the school was most active during the 1920s and ’30s.

Linguists of the Prague school stress the function of elements within language, the contrast of language elements to one another, and the total pattern or system formed by these contrasts, and they have distinguished themselves in the study of sound systems. They developed distinctive-feature analysis of sounds; by this analysis, each distinctive sound.

The members of The Prague School thought of language as a whole as serving a purpose.

Prague linguists, on the other hand, looked at languages as one might look at a motor, seeking to understand what jobs the various components were doing and how the nature of one component determined the nature of others.

They tried to go beyond description to explanations, saying not just what languages were like but why they were the way they were. Mathesius: theme and rheme. Trubetzkoy distinguished various functions that can be served by a phonological opposition: Distinctive function, delimitative function, culminative function.

One of the characteristic of the Prague approach to language was readiness to acknowledge that a given language might include.

The Descriptivist´ approach to phonology might be described metaphorically as `democratic´.

The Descriptivists

The Descriptivists