Stratification in Language

This series focuses on studies concerning the theory and application of Systemic Functional Linguistics. It bears the name of Professor M.A.K. Halliday, as he is generally regarded as the founder of this school of linguistic thought. The series covers studies on language and context, functional grammar, semantic variation, discourse analysis, multimodality, register and genre analysis, educational linguistics and other areas. Systemic Functional Linguistics is a functional model of language inspired by the work of linguists such as Saussure, Hjelmslev, Whorf, and Firth. The theory was initially developed by Professor M.A.K. Halliday and his colleagues in London during the 1960s, and since 1974 it has held an international congress every year at various continents around the world. It is well-known for its application in a variety of fields, including education, translation, computational linguistics, multimodal studies, and healthcare, and scholars are always exploring new areas of application.

ÖZSfiB HORÄNYI CULTURE AND METASEMIOTICS IN FILM 1 Culture means a way of life following rules and patterns accepted and ratified by the community and society. It means forms of praxis connected in space and time, kinds of praxis objectivated in practice. This praxis has, naturally, a great many consequences on the environment and the individual. Many definitions of culture approach the problem from this pragmatic side as, for example, when civilization is considered to be personal culture-even the so-called objective culture. This obviously includes the possibility that culture values or, more exactly, prefers certain elements of the mass of behaviour possible in theory. We can consider culture as value only in this respect. In other words, behaviour is regulated, settled, 'civilized'. A further important element of culture is its inheritability, for it can be transferred by objectivation in the different supports of culture (in media), in other words, in sign systems. In point of fact, literature, language, music, film, etc., are all supports of culture. Speaking about audiovisual culture we mean nothing else but information objectivated, 'composed' in serhiotic systems operating with visible and audible sign-vehicles at the same time (e.g., worker's behaviour models in present-day Hungarian films). Culture is also a system of information in this sense and it can be rightfully comprehended as a code or semiotic system which, according to Lotman,?• directs, leads or generates the praxis of being a text (Lotman calls this the culture of grammars). We can consider culture a text, or a collection of texts, if we do not think of rules but of patterns similar to those formed by practice (this would be the culture of texts). Thus our interest is attracted by the typological characteristics of single concrete cultures. I quote here Baläzs: "The silent forms of expressions of film have developed gradually but very quickly and they have developed the ability of the public to understand this new form language at the same time. Not only a new art has taken shape before our eyes but a man with new sensibility, new ability and new culre"T his passage points to two things. A sign system is not only the composer

The objectives of this study were to find out signs, the realization of signs in to denotative and connotative meanings, and the reasons for signs realization on Tugu Si Raja Batak in Sarimarrihit Village, Sianjur Mula-Mula sub-district, Samosir Regency. The study was conducted using a qualitative approach. The data of this study were taken from Tugu Si Raja Batak. The data of the study were statues and pictures on Tugu Si Raja Batak. The data analysis was taken by observing, interviewing, and then analyzed the data based on the theory proposed by Roland Barthes. The findings indicated that there were twenty-two signs on Tugu Si Raja Batak in four forms, namely human ornaments, animal ornaments, plant ornaments, and carving. The signs of human ornaments were the Si Raja Batak means descendants with different clans and some servants for different work. The signs of animal ornaments made to show that Si Raja Batak and his descendants used the animals around him as transportations. The...

From the 1940s to the 1970s the langue-parole antinomy has proved to be a privileged field to investigate the discontinuity between Saussurism and Structuralism, becoming the cornerstone of the renewal of Saussure's doctrine in European Structuralism. In this controversy, Coseriu's program of Integral Linguistics has been extremely significant, since he rethought the langue-parole distinction in the framework of a monist theory hinging on a permanent dialectics between energeia, dynamis and ergon, the three points of view by which linguistic activity should be examined. Coseriu’s conception of language, enriched by an unceasing epistemological bearing that sounds distinctively odd in a climate of enduring cognitivism, is thought to be a good alternative against a one-dimensional vision of language as a brain-mind device. Nonetheless, what could reach this aim is not the Hjelmslevian-Coserian norm as a further abstracted level between langue and parole, since an overall principle of intersubjectivity and normativity deeply rooted in a conception of language which, in accordance with the Humboldtian-Saussurean heritage, could result in a renewed semantics of language and languages. This paper will thus illustrate Coseriu's threefold definition of language as a human faculty, a social system, and as an individual instrument, in order to see the impasse of the current cognitive approaches, markedly unfamiliar with notions such as norm and (linguistic) meaning, in a new light.

Cultural Studies is a trans-disciplinary academic field in which concepts and perspectives from different disciplines are selectively drawn, re-articulated, and re-theorised to examine the relations of culture and power. The field borrows freely theories and methodologies from Social Science disciplines and all branches of Humanities and the Arts (Sadair and Van Loow 1997: 7). The present paper discusses the contribution of Linguistics to the trans-disciplinarity of Cultural Studies. The discussion centres on the works of Ferdinand de Saussure, Claude Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Stuart Hall as respective representatives of respective eras of Structural Linguistics, Structuralism, Semiology, and (British) Cultural Studies.

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a leading scholar in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Together with William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, he developed Rhetorical Structure Theory, a discourse analytical framework which he has continued to expand and extend using insights from the architecture of SFL. Some of his other contributions are in the area of functional language typology, theoretical modelling of the dimensions of language and comprehensive paradigmatic description of English lexicogrammatical systems. In this interview, he discusses his early experience in linguistics and his motivations for working with Systemic Functional Linguistics. The interview also sheds light on the interaction between SFL and other linguistic schools in the European and American linguistic traditions, and indicates the distinctive contributions of SFL to linguistic science. The discussion contributes to the history of linguistics and the debates on the meta-theory of language.

Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen is a leading scholar in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Together with William C. Mann and Sandra A. Thompson, he developed Rhetorical Structure Theory, a discourse analytical framework which he has continued to expand and extend using insights from the architecture of SFL. Some of his other contributions are in the area of functional language typology, theoretical modelling of the dimensions of language and comprehensive paradigmatic description of English lexicogrammatical systems. In this interview, he discusses his early experience in linguistics and his motivations for working with Systemic Functional Linguistics. The interview also sheds light on the interaction between SFL and other linguistic schools in the European and American linguistic traditions, and indicates the distinctive contributions of SFL to linguistic science. The discussion contributes to the history of linguistics and the debates on the meta-theory of language.

This article examines whether the incorporation of prosody within register studies can lead to a richer description of what speakers can mean in a specific environment. In order to situate how prosody resets the probabilities of contextual variables, a number of texts are examined and it is argued that prosodic systems at and above the rank of tone group are meaningful and situated on the content plane. The article concludes by suggesting some redrawing of the standard SFL stratification model by arguing that the view that meaning redounds with wording which in turn redounds with sounding needs some revision to incorporate the higher units of the phonological rank scale being situated on the content plane.

This paper offers a detailed exploration of four types of differentiations on which Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language, developed in his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1963Language ( /1943)), is built: content-expression; form-substance-purport; system-process and paradigm-syntagm. Each of these distinctions is explored in turn, and in this exploration it becomes clear how Hjelmslev defines his most important distinctions, viz. content-expression and form-substance-purport, which form the corner stones of his stratified model of language, on different levels of abstraction. It is only by carefully considering his most abstract level of description, that the interaction between the different dimensions, and the nature of the 'sign', which is explained by Hjelmslev as lying at the centre of cross-cutting dimensions of differentiations, can be fully understood. The specific nature of Hjelmslev's theory is further fleshed out by relating his distinctions to de Saussure's theory of language; and by further contextualizing his model, historiographically, in the framework of (1) the earlier study of the phonic Hjelmslev's semiotic model of language: An exegesis p. 2 P R E P R I N T M. Taverniers side of language in the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, and (2) Barthes's later reinterpretation of one of Hjelmslev's most innovative concepts, viz. the connotative semiotic.

In this paper we present methodological solutions that were proposed for maintaining knowledge attached to long term space missions and to scientific data. It turned out that the question of maintaining the intelligibility of the information processed, i.e. facing the semantic change issue, was closely associated to the knowledge preservation issue as its very motivation. This orientation had a significant impact upon the nature of the research and the type of methodology that was developed at a later stage: the research was multidisciplinary and the methodology evolved toward a multi-viewpoints semiotics. However if the methods we used allow us to detect semantic changes they cannot guarantee to allow us to detect knowledge changes. The reason is that knowledge is a semiotic notion and not a semantic one. This paper is an epistemological contribution to the issue of knowledge changes.

Argumentation consists of representation of the basic stlUcturalist concepts of language/semiotic as a two-level form, as a form of expression and here especially form of content, and of application of these concepts to the phenomena of the representation of the contents of documents. On the basis of argumentation the paper questions the notion of "organizing knowledge", is it, or in what sense it is possible to organize knowledge. The paper hings out some reservations to viewing content representation as organizing knowledge in a strong sense and suggests that instead could be used a notion of (meta)documentation, characterized as communication concerning documents.

1. In this paper we present methodological solutions that were proposed for maintaining knowledge attached to long term space missions and to scientific data. It turned out that the question of maintaining the intelligibility of the information processed, i.e. facing the semantic change issue, was closely associated to the knowledge preservation issue as its very motivation. This orientation had a significant impact upon the nature of the research and the type of methodology that was developed at a later stage: the research was multidisciplinary and the methodology evolved toward a multi-viewpoints semiotics. However if the methods we used allow us to detect semantic changes they cannot guarantee to allow us to detect knowledge changes. The reason is that knowledge is a semiotic notion and not a semantic one. This paper is an epistemological contribution to the issue of knowledge changes.

The volume is published on the occasion of the birth centennial of Eugenio Coseriu (1921–2002). It is the first collective volume to appear in English in which various scholars present a variety of perspectives on Coseriu’s scholarly work and discuss its continuing relevance for the language sciences. Coseriu’s international reputation has suffered from his commitment to publish in languages such as Spanish, German, French, Italian, Romanian and Portuguese, to the detriment of English. As a consequence, his work is less well-known outside Romance and German linguistics. The volume aims to raise the general awareness of Coseriu’s work among linguists around the world, in accordance with Coseriu’s own adage that it takes a constructive mindset (acknowledging "accomplishments and limitations") to do justice to all scholarly work in the humanities. The articles are organized into three major thematic clusters: 1) philosophy of language, 2) history of the language sciences and 3) theory and practice of "Integral Linguistics". The volume is essential reading for anyone working in these fields and for those seeking to gain deeper understanding of Coseriu’s goal to develop a unitary approach to language which takes as its point of departure the "activity of speaking".

This article revisits the idea of parallelism between the two semiotic planes – expression and content – focusing on two seemingly contradictory analogies found in the structural literature, namely expression figurae : sign expressions :: content figurae : sign contents and phonic features : phonemes :: semantic features : signifieds. It is shown that, though it may not seem to be the case at first glance, both analogies describe the same types of relations and can be regarded as equally valid from the point of view of their respective theoretical frameworks and levels of analysis. However, a functional synthesis of the two views ultimately reveals an asymmetry in the categorical structure of the two planes, a situation that is explained by the nature of the relationship between expression and content.

The main aim of this article is to show how a possible theoretical articulation between Uexküll's notion of Funktionskreis and the stratificational model of semiotic structures proposed by Louis Hjelmslev can be made. In order to bridge the gap between these two models, Luis Prieto's model of cognition will be used. The advantage of Prieto's model is that it retains the Hjelmslevian stratificational ideas (i.e. a semiotic structure is made up of an expression and a content plane, each one with a dimension of form and substance), while it also pays attention to agency and practice. To put it briefly, according to Prieto the foundation of practice and knowledge is to be found on aisthesis. Hence, as in Uexküll, there is a way to merge action with perception, while retaining the semiotic structure that makes such a merging possible. The key point, however, is that Prieto's model calls for an "ontological commitment" to the substance strata (both in expression and in content to some extent). Therefore, bridging Uexküll and Hjelmslev via Prieto suggests a possible way to provide a general structural model of semiosis which is closer to semiotic realism than to immanentism usually attributed to structuralism.

Grammatical theories called " systemic grammar " and " systemic functional linguistics " are more or less the same. In the most concrete terms, the language functions, as Halliday, Matthiessen, and many other linguists put it, are specific to culture. Systemic grammar is the grammatical school that deliberates on the functional accountability of systems in practical context, in a particular speech community. Unlike other grammatical schools that do speculation on the syntactic analysis of a language, systemic grammar is deeply bothered about language's practical applicability. It actually predicts the possible number of " choices " according to the context. Every utterance is a selection from the number of choices a language practitioner can make in an available linguistic environment. A speaker makes the selection of a particular choice according to the meaning potential of it in a particular context. The collection of available choices of usage is called the " grammar " of the language. The grammar itself takes the form of a series of system networks and hence the title " systemic grammar. " The aim of systemic grammar is not only to characterize our actual use of language but also to predict the choices that we make and how these choices are contextually conditioned. The most remarkable outcome of Hallidayan linguistic theories is his linking of language with society and humanity as a whole. He always considered language as a social asset to be transferred to generations. In that sense, Halliday is the most democratic of all linguists, who abhorred arm chair deliberations in modern linguistics.

In this article – which may look like a collage of quotations – I aim at mentioning the opinions of some famous linguists with regard to the so called "unconsciousness" of common speakers manifested within the linguistic activity as such (that is during the process of communication). Consequently, I will present the ideas of some American linguists (E. Sapir, L. Bloomfield and Ch. Hockett), taking into account both the opinions of certain European forerunners (H. Paul and F. de Saussure), and the subsequent criticism formulated by E. Coseriu concerning the respective linguistic "unconsciousness".

The aim of this paper is to illustrate Eugenio Coseriu’s conception of linguistic norm considered as a descriptive term and to relate it a) to its place in Coseriu’s theory of language, b) to the history of linguistic thought, c) to normative conceptions in Coseriu’s theory, and d) to other concepts, mainly to that of discourse traditions (Koch 1997), largely discussed during the last years. I will depart from some general observations on Coseriu’s terminology and on his relationship with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, showing how Coseriu develops his conception of norm in a discussion of the limits of the langue-parole distinction. The next step will be to introduce Coseriu’s terms of correctness and exemplarity and to indicate the relationship between norm and discourse traditions.

In this essay, I will discuss the way in which myth works according to Barthes. I am interested in the economical process whereby it purifies concepts into essences. I will also briefly comment on how different systems of meaning create or abolish hierarchies. For this I will draw a brief comparison between Barthes’s theories on myth, and medieval hermeneutics. Finally, I will discuss the apparent aporia whereby myth can constitute depoliticised speech, and, at the same time, be deeply political.

The study is a systematic reversal of the widely held view that language, in a generic sense is broadly divided into three namely: human language, animal language and sign language. The researcher rather recognizes the existence of two instead of three. The third does not exist based on its failure to meet up with the precepts of the developed universal structure of human language. Five stages were adopted in carrying out the research work. It starts gradually from the known and perhaps , the simple aspect of language study as was conceived by early language scholars to the recent view of systemic functional scholars on language. Based on it, the universal structure of human language emerged. Following it is the crude diagram showing the universal structure of human language, the diagram of sign language, the imposition of sign language on the structure of the universal structure of human language, the diagram showing communication network and the place of sign in communication before conclusion was drawn.

The study is a systematic reversal of the widely held view that language, in a generic sense is broadly divided into three namely: human language, animal language and sign language. The researcher rather recognizes  the existence  of two instead of three. The third does not exist based on its failure to meet up with the precepts of the developed universal structure of human language.  Five stages  were adopted in carrying out the research work.  It starts gradually from the known and perhaps , the simple aspect of language study as was conceived by early language scholars to the recent view of systemic functional scholars on language. Based on it, the universal structure of human language emerged. Following it is the crude diagram showing the universal structure of human language, the diagram of sign language, the imposition of sign language on the structure of the universal structure of human language, the diagram showing communication network and the place of sign in communication before conclusion was drawn.

Roland Barthes is one of the most well-known semioticians outside academic circles. That knowledge is sometimes based on misconceptions about his theory of signs, extrapolated from Saussure. This article will offer an outline of Roland Barthes' sign theory, demonstrating the ways that it is derived and adapted from Saussure and how Saussure is refracted through Barthes' readings of other linguists. It will look in particular at Barthes' innovations in sign theory: denotation, connotation and metalanguage, as well as his extension of linguistic thinking to analyse nonverbal modes. It will also discuss Barthes' notion of 'myth' and its influence as a concept. The article will consider a number of instances from media and cultural studies where Barthes' interpretations have not only given subsequent uses of sign theory license to speculate beyond Saussure's original linguistic bearing but have also unwittingly contributed to the stagnation of semiotic analysis.

The Rumanian linguist Eugenio Coseriu , who lived most of his academic career in Italy, Uruguay and Germany, had several contacts, personally and theoretically, with Scandinavian linguists. This interplay has been of great importance in international linguistics, among other things in the evolution of variational linguistics. The presentation will be focused on Coseriu's relationship to the theories of the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev and the Norwegian linguist Leiv Flydal. Firstly it will be demonstrated how Coseriu on one hand recognized Hjelmslev as one of the most important founders of modern linguistics and on the other hand distanced himself from Hjelmslev's glossematic theory as part of exposing his own theory. Secondly it will be shown how Coseriu further develops some linguistic concepts introduced by Flydal. Flydal followed the glossematics of Hjelmslev, but was a founding father of variational linguistics, introducing the concepts of 'architecture de langue', and 'perspectives diatopique et diastratique'. Among other things Coseriu adds another dimension, 'diafatique'. Finally will be pointed at some research fields concerning the history (and the future) of variational linguistics.

Structuralism is the name that is given to a wide range of discourses that study underlying structures of signification. After the class presentation, I had a general understanding of Structuralism , realized that its origin from linguistic theory and then holds all human activity and its products, even perception and thought itself, are constructed and not natural. Structuralism is a broad-based rational theory that focus on signs and organization in various aspects of human culture, so it is closely related to Semiotics, the study of signs, symbols and communication, and how meaning is constructed and understood.

In Item-and-Arrangement models of inflection, morphemes are associations of form and meaning stored in a mental lexicon. Saussure’s notion of the linguistic sign as a unit of an acoustic image (signifier) and a concept (signified) immediately suggests such a model. But close examination of the examples of inflectional morphology throughout the Cours brings Saussure’s ideas more in line with Process morphology, a model in which recurrent elements in word forms are exponents of content features, and realizational rules license a word form inferentially from the word’s content. The Saussurean sign allowed French structuralists to revolutionize the methods of modern social science, eschewing the motives and intentions of human actors to focus on the system of oppositions that make signification possible in each domain.
Eventually, post-structuralism rejected the static nature of the linguistic sign, forcing linguistics into relative isolation (since it held on to sign-based models of language). The criticism of structuralist treatments of morphology in Process models of inflection, however, stands as an exception to this tendency. In retrospect, I argue, similar ideas can be found in Saussure’s view of the langue as a complex algebra.

A critique of Hjelmslev’s semiotics of metalanguage and a reinterpretation of his embedding model makes it possible to reformulate a semiotics of language and develop new models for meaning production and communication in music, poetry, and visual art, yielding new insights on the functions of complex semiosis.

This course was taught at the applied virtuality theory lab, CAAD ETH Zurich, in Winter 2013 and Summer 2014

Since Claude Shannon‘s Mathematical Theory of Communication (1936), the notion of information in its technically treatable sense is often distinguished from its linguistic sense by ascribing to the former, as opposed to the latter, a purely quantitative treatment. Yet since the founding documents of a general linguistics in the late 19th century, it is clear for every linguist who affirms the break with the traditional way of studying language as philology, that the notion of the sign is to be treated purely quantitatively as well. Ferdinand de Saussure‘s structuralist paradigm for understanding processes of signification views the linguistic sign as a quantitative value, yet as a negative one which cannot, in itself, be positivized. As a negative value, it can only be specified by „profiling“ it through infinitary lists and their net of contrasts: a ,this‘ can never be signified directly, Saussure held, but only by labelling it as ,not-that‘ and not-that‘ and ,not-that‘ etc. In short, a linguistic sign can only be determined structurally and differentially, within a framework of place-value distributions.

From a logical point of view, de Saussure‘s paradigm of negative determination obviously entails problems regarding methodological feasibility, since it holds, by principle, that the necessary infinitary lists can never exhaustively be made explicit. This is the decisive reason why de Saussure himself considered his own structural approach, which attempted to conceive of language as a system, as having ultimately failed. Surely the post-structuralist critiques on such a notion of general linguistics are well known; yet from the point of view of algebraic computability (rather than that of logics), the situation looks different and is hardly explored today. Louis Hjelmslev is one of the very few linguists who continued the „differentiability within negativity“ approach initiated by de Saussure, by extending it mathematically. He considered Saussure‘s ,negative values‘ in a generalized sense as ,algebraic invariants‘. Like this, the structuralist paradigm is open for taking probabilistic procedures like Markov Chains and other algorithms, with which the diverse programming languages ordinarily work today, into account. From the logical point of view, this can hardly count as a forward pointing path, since it does not clarify how a notion of system could be objectified.

Yet with regard to the logistic networks, such fixation is (arguably) neither necessary nor desireable. Here, Hjelmslev‘s algebraic approach offers a powerful alternative to the pre-dominant approaches in terms of semantic or object-oriented (informational) database logic and ontologies, because it is capable of abstracting from the distinction between natural language vs artifical/formal language and needs not subject one to the other: communication and signification can be treated as mutually complementary aspects.

In this kolloquium we will work through Hjelmslev‘s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943), and appropriate it methods in practice. We want to explore if and how structural linguistics as glossematics (in the sense of Hjelmslev) can be extended towards an alphabet of things that were capable of integrating the operability of generative linguistics (Chomsky etc), and hence could provide a powerful method of pre-specific modeling.

In the second chapter of The Time-Image, Deleuze addresses the conditions of possibility of a semiology of cinema. These conditions depend on the relations between cinema and language: under what conditions can cinematic images and signs be understood as a language? In other words, (how) can cinematic images and signs be inscribed in the discursive plane of the signifiable? Discussing Christian Metz's semiological approach of cinema, Deleuze argues that the structural conditions of linguistics and of post-Saussurian semiology cannot adequately render intelligible the specificity of cinematic semiosis. Drawing on Louis Hjelmslev's semiotics, Deleuze redefines the specificity of a relation of designation distinct from a relation of signification (strictly linguistic), a specificity that concerns the fact that the designative relation is antecedent and heterogeneous to any signifying relation. Put differently, the very constitution of the sign is redefined: in opposition to semiology, semiotics becomes the study of images and signs as (1) being independent of language in general and (2) expressing a "non-language material". This article explicates the importance of Hjelmslev's semiotic theory in The Time-Image by offering a detailed account of the constitution of the sign in Hjelmslev's Prolegomena to a Theory of Language and by tracing Deleuze's earlier appreciation of Hjelmslev in Anti-Oedipus and its intricate relation to his appreciation of Jean-François Lyotard's theory of designation in Discourse

[talk by Ellen Fricke & Martin Siefkes]

The Danish linguist and semiotician Louis Hjelmslev (1899 –1965), founder of the Copenhagen school of structuralism, developed a theory of language called “glossematics” whose basic tenets are closely related to linguistic realism. Hjelmslev was critical of contemporary linguistics, which he deemed to be “vague and subjective, metaphysical and aestheticising” (1963: 10); against these tendencies, he proposed that “[i]t is the aim of linguistic theory to test […] the thesis that a process has an underlying system – a fluctuation an underlying constancy.” Hjelmslev envisaged a theory of language to which he only wanted to give the “prolegomena” or methodological basis, a theory which would follow what he called the “empirical principle”: it would be “free of contradictions (self-consistent), exhaustive, and as simple as possible” (ibid.: 11), criteria comparable to those formulated by the Vienna circle, and later by Karl Popper, for scientific theories.

More unusual than Hjelmslev’s unabashed pro-scientific stance is his opposition to induction in linguistics, which he describes as “progression from component to class”, e.g. the abstraction from individual sounds to phonemes. He argued that this sort of generalization created concepts with many accidental properties, denoting different phenomena in different single languages: categories such as “genitive”, “perfect”, or “passive” do not refer to the same phenomena in Greek, Latin, etc.

Hjelmslev contended that induction leads to descriptions that are neither self-consistent nor simple, and thus clashes with his “empirical principle”. The inductive method leads to “the abstraction of concepts which are then hypostatized as real” (ibid.: 12). Hjelmslev assumed a different kind of reality for language, not as a mere generalization of language use, but rather as an abstract object for whose investigation specific methods had to be developed. Hjelmslev therefore proposed that an approach to language can only be called “empirical” if it starts from the unanalyzed text, and proceeded to build glossematics as an analytical theory that presupposes only the text in its immediately observable form, whose units are then determined with structuralist methods (such as the commutation and replacement tests) which have to be theoretically justified.

From glossematics, an analytical theory of language formulated more than 70 years ago, a powerful argument against the dominating linguistic paradigms of recent decades can be made: both generative grammar, which presupposes grammatical categories, deep structure, and transformation rules, and cognitive linguistics, which presupposes various types of cognitive structures, do not fulfill the requirements Hjelmslev set down for empirically adequate linguistic theories.

A further important result is Hjelmslev’s distinction between form and substance, both on the level of expression and the level of content. Glossematics assumes that natural languages, as well as other sign systems, are characterized by specific systems of form distinguishing them from other languages or sign systems, systems of form which can however be manifested in different substances. Not only speech and writing, but also gesture function as substances. The distinction between form and its manifestation in specific substances is unique to glossematics, and enables an entirely new approach to problems of multimodality: an important argument for the realism of languages as abstract entities is gained by showing that languages are indeed distinct from their expression in specific substances, such as speech, writing, or gesture.

Bibliography:
– Fricke, Ellen (2012), Grammatik multimodal: Wie Wörter und Gesten zusammenwirken. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
– Fricke, Ellen (2013), “Towards a unified grammar of gesture and speech: A multimodal approach”, in: Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke et al. (eds.), Body – Language – Communication. An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, vol. 1, 733–754.
– Hjelmslev, Louis (1963), Prolegomena to a Theory of Language. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Translated by Francis J. Whitfield. First published as (1943): Omkring sprogteoriens grundlæggelse. Kopenhagen: Munksgaard.
– Johansen, Jørgen Dines (1998), „Hjelmslev and Glossematics“, in: Posner, Roland, Klaus Robering und Thomas A. Sebeok (Hg.) (1997–2004), Semiotik / Semiotics. Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur. 4 vols. Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 2: 2272–2289.
– Nöth, Winfried (2000), Handbuch der Semiotik. 2nd, revised ed. Stuttgart: Metzler. 78–87.
– Siefkes, Martin (2015), “Sturm auf die Zeichen. Was die Semiotik von ihren Kritikern lernen kann”. Schriften zur Kultur- und Mediensemiotik Online 1/2015: 7–42.