Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (1899 – 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Hjelmslev was born into an academic family of linguists, and he studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris.
Hjelmslev was born in 1899 in Copenhagen. He enrolled at the University of Copenhagen in 1917 to study Romance and comparative philology, and he studied with Holger Pedersen among others. His MA thesis on Lithuanian phonetics was completed in 1923, based on fieldwork conducted in Lithuania in 1921. He received a doctorate in comparative Indo-European philology from 1932, and later took over Holger Pedersen’s chair at Copenhagen University after having been in Aarhus from 1934 to 1937.
In 1931, he founded the Copenhague Circle of Linguistics. For work, he is more widely known for his theory of language, Glossematics, which has inspired a great many European semioticians. As a linguist, he was part of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen and was influential in the rapid development of scientific structuralism in the 1930s. Semiotics has taken many concepts from him, including those of Ferdinand de Saussure and Hjelmslev.
These concepts include semiotics, expression, content, form, and substance. To these he added concepts specific to glossematics, such as neutral (term), complex (term), connotative (semiotic), metasemiotic, and norm. His work is difficult to understand, partly because of the ever-changing editorial and philological context, and partly because his writings are highly abstract and formalized. Semiotics is an important field of study for anyone who wants to understand the theoretical aspects of communication.
Hjelmslev published his first paper at the age of 25, which showcased his groundbreaking work in philosophy. His first major book, “Principes de grammaire générale”, is an important source for anyone interested in Hjelmslev’s work. During the 1930s, Hjelmslev wrote another book, “La catégorie des cas”, which was a major contribution to linguistics. In this book, Hjelmslev analyzed the general category of case in great detail, providing ample empirical material to support his hypotheses. Hjelmslev’s work is an important contribution to the epistemology of linguistics, as it evolves over time.
He is well-known for his book, Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse, which critiques the then-prevailing methodologies in linguistics and calls for a more systematic approach. He proposed a linguistic theory that is intended to form the basis for a more rational linguistics and a contribution to general epistemology.
Like Ferdinand de Saussure, he accepted language as a system of signs, from the perspective of how people use it. His work stays an eminent contribution to the field of Linguistics even in today’s research.
