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 (1899–1965) and Viggo Brøndal (1887–1942). 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 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". However since Hjelmslev's death in 1965 left his theories mostly on the programmatic level, the group around Hjelmslev and his glossematic theory dispersed, and while the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle continued to exist it was not really a "school" united by common theoretical perspectives.
More than the other schools, the Glossematic School referred to the teachings of Saussure, even though it was in many aspects connected with older traditions. Thus, it tried once more to combine logics and grammar. At any rate, Hjelmslev has taken over the psychological interpretation of the linguistic sign and thereby extended his study of the sign further than language as such.
The principal ideas of the school are:
- A language consists of content and expression.
- A language consists of a succession and a system.
- Content and expression are interconnected by commutation.
- There are certain relations in the succession and the system.
- There are no one-to-one correspondents between content and expression, but the signs may be divided into smaller components.
Even more than Saussure, the Copenhagen School is interested in the langue rather than parole. It represented in a pure form the idea that language is a form and not a substance. It studied the relational system within the language on a higher level of abstraction.
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