Louis Hjelmslev

Louis Hjelmslev was a Danish linguist who developed glossematics, a highly formal theory of language that sought to describe linguistic structure through abstract relations between elements rather than through their physical or psychological substance. Hjelmslev, who co-founded the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle in 1931, argued that a rigorous linguistic theory should be able to describe the underlying structural relationships of any language, or even any sign system more broadly, independent of how that structure happens to be physically expressed, whether in sound, writing or another medium, distinguishing what he called the form of expression and the form of content from their respective physical substances. His major theoretical statement, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlaeggelse, published in 1943 and later translated into English as Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, aimed to place linguistics on an axiomatic, logically rigorous footing comparable to mathematics. Hjelmslev's structural approach to language as a system of relations, developed independently of but roughly contemporaneously with the Prague School, became an important influence on later structuralist and semiotic approaches to analyzing not only language but other systems of signs and meaning.