15 Facts About Louis Hjelmslev

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

Louis Hjelmslev regarded linguistics – or glossematics – as a formal science.

Louis Hjelmslev's theory became widely influential in structural and functional grammar, and in semiotics.

Louis Hjelmslev enrolled into the University of Copenhagen in 1917 to study Romance and later comparative philology, where he studied with Holger Pedersen among others.

Louis Hjelmslev received a doctorate in comparative Indo-European philology for his Etudes baltiques from 1932, and later took over Holger Pedersen's chair in Copenhagen after having been in Aarhus from 1934 to 1937.

Related searches

Louis Hjelmslev's first major book, Principes de grammaire generale, which he finished in 1928, is an invaluable source for anyone interested in Hjelmslev's work.

Louis Hjelmslev made his first academic journey at 1921 to Lithuania to study Lithuanian, an experience which can be traced throughout his works.

Louis Hjelmslev proposed a linguistic theory intended to form the basis of a more rational linguistics and a contribution to general epistemology.

Louis Hjelmslev argued that a theory of semiotics should be consistent within itself, comprehensive, and as simple as possible.

Louis Hjelmslev's sign model is a development of Saussure's bilateral sign model.

Louis Hjelmslev famously renamed signifier and signified as respectively expression plane and content plane, and distinguished between form and substance.

In Louis Hjelmslev's analysis, a sign is a function between two forms, the content form and the expression form, and this is the starting point of linguistic analysis.

In short, Louis Hjelmslev was proposing an open-ended, scientific method of analysis as a new semiotics.

Louis Hjelmslev made a bold proposal to transform technical analysis into a broad enquiry, emphasising that the true focus of linguistics should be the language and the human culture that continually reinvents it, and all society's memory of its accumulated knowledge preserved through language.

Louis Hjelmslev introduced the terms glosseme, ceneme, prosodeme and plereme as linguistic units, analogous to phoneme, morpheme, etc.