 | This article includes alist of references,related reading, orexternal links,but its sources remain unclear because it lacksinline citations. Please helpimprove this article byintroducing more precise citations.(October 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
TheCopenhagen School is a group of scholars dedicated to the study oflinguistics, centered aroundLouis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and theLinguistic Circle of Copenhagen (French:Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague,Danish:Lingvistkredsen), founded by him andViggo Brøndal (1887–1942).[1]: 160 In the mid-twentieth century, the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres oflinguistic structuralism, together with theGeneva School and thePrague School. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the Copenhagen school's approach to linguistics has evolved from purelystructural tofunctionalist, culminating inDanish functional linguistics—which, despite the "functional" moniker, nonetheless incorporates many insights from the founders of the Linguistic Circle.
The Copenhagen School of Linguistics evolved around Louis Hjelmslev and his developingtheory of language,glossematics. In 1931, he and Viggo Brøndal together founded theCercle Linguistique de Copenhague,[2] a group of linguists based on the model of thePrague Linguistic Circle. Within theCercle, the ideas of Brøndal and Hjelmslev were not always compatible; Hjelmslev’s moreformalist approach attracted a group of followers—principal among themHans Jørgen Uldall andEli Fischer-Jørgensen—who would strive to apply Hjelmslev's abstract ideas on the nature of language to analyses of actual linguistic data.[3]
Hjelmslev’s objective was to establish a framework for understanding communication as a formal system, and an important part of this was the development of precise terminology to describe the different parts of linguistic systems and their interrelations. The basic theoretical framework, called “Glossematics”, was laid out in Hjelmslev’s two main works:Prolegomena to a Theory of Language andRésumé of a Theory of Language. However, since Hjelmslev's death in 1965 left his theories mostly on the programmatic level, the group that had formed around Hjelmslev and his glossematic theory dispersed—while the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle continued to exist, it was not really a "school" united by a common theoretical perspective.
In 1989, a group of Circle members, inspired by the advances incognitive linguistics and the functionalist theories ofSimon C. Dik, founded the school ofDanish Functional Grammar, aiming to combine the ideas of Hjelmslev and Brøndal, and those of other important Danish linguists, such asPaul Diderichsen andOtto Jespersen, with modern functional linguistics. Among the prominent members of this new generation of the Copenhagen School werePeter Harder,Elisabeth Engberg-Pedersen,Frans Gregersen,Una Canger andMichael Fortescue. The basic work of the school isDansk Funktionel Grammatik (Danish Functional Grammar) by Harder (2006). Recent developments in the school include Ole Nedergaard Thomsen’sFunctional DiscoursePragmatics.
In the following, the two stages of the Copenhagen School will be described as (1) the glossematic school, and (2) Danish functional linguistics.
Brøndal emphasised that formal properties of a system should be kept apart from its substance. Accordingly, Hjelmslev—as the key figure of the Copenhagen School in the 1930s—developed the formal linguistic theory which later became known asglossematics (meaning something like "language-form study"; fromglossa-, "language", and-eme). He formulated his linguistic theory together withHans Jørgen Uldall as an attempt to analyse the expression (phonetics and grammar) and the meaning of a language on a coherent basis. He assumed that spoken or natural language was not the only instrument of communication (consider, e.g.,sign language), and he was interested in the most general theory of signs and communication—semiotics orsemiology.
More than the other schools, the Glossematic School referred to the teachings ofSaussure, even though it was in many aspects connected with older traditions. Thus, it tried once more to combine logic and grammar. At any rate, Hjelmslev had 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:
Even more than Saussure, the Copenhagen School is interested in thelangue rather thanparole. 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.
Acta Linguistica Hafniensia is anacademic journal run in collaboration with the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.[4] It was started in 1939 byViggo Brøndal andLouis Hjelmslev and originally focused onstructural linguistics.[5] Editors have includedPeter Harder,Hartmut Haberland andLars Heltoft.[6]
The school ofDanish functional linguistics (DFL) was developed in an attempt to combine modernfunctional grammar andcognitive linguistics with the best ideas and concepts of the earlierstructuralist school. Like Hjelmslev and Saussure, the approach insists on the basic structural division of communication in planes of content and expression.[7] LikeSimon Dik and other functionalist grammarians, Danish functionalists also insist that language is—most fundamentally—a means of communication between humans, and is hence best understood and analysed through its communicative function.
When analysing linguistic utterances, the content and expression planes are analysed separately, with the expression plane being analysed through traditional structural methods and the content plane being analysed mostly through methods fromsemantics andpragmatics. However, it is assumed that structures on the expression plane mirror structures on the content plane. This can be seen in the parallelism between,(a), the syntactic structure of sentences as described by theDiderichsen model, which divides utterances into a foundation field (sentence theme), a nexus field (the finite verb and its arguments/modifiers), and a content field (non-finite verb and object thereof); and,(b), the pragmatic structure of utterances, which may often be analysed as comprising a foundation field (for discourse-pragmatic functions), a nexus field (for illocutionary functions), and a content field (for the linguistic message).
Danish functionalists assume that an utterance is not to be analysed from the minimal units and up, but rather from the maximal units and down, because this best reflects the way that speakers construct utterances: by first choosingwhat to say in a given situation; then by choosing which words to use; and, finally, by speaking aloud the corresponding sounds.
An example of a two-planed analysis is given below, as applied to the utterance "The book hasn't been read by anyone for a while." On thecontent plane, the utterance consists of: the topic (in this case, "the book")—that which the sentence is about, and which links it to the larger discourse; the declarative illocutionary force of the utterance (conveyed, here, by "hasn't"); and the predicate ("hasn't been read by anyone for a while"), which is the message to be communicated. On theexpression plane, the elements comprising the sentence are characterized as being: "the book", a noun phrase with a determiner; "hasn't", a finite verb with a negational adverb; and a passive verbal phrase—"been read"—with an agent, "by anyone", and a time adverb, "for a while".
| Utterance: | The book | hasn't | been read by anyone for a while. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content | Topic (known information) | Declarative illocutionary force | Predicate("to be read") + Specifier("by anyone") + Time-frame("for a while") |
| Expression | Determiner + Noun | Nexus: Intransitive verb + Present tense + Negation | Passive verb + Agent + Time adverb |
An example of a descriptive work within Danish functional linguistics is the 2011 grammar ofDanish by Erik Hansen & Lars Heltoft,Grammatik over det Danske Sprog ("Grammar over the Danish Language").[8]