Louis Hjelmslev on the correlational structure of language

Abstract

Abstract Occupying a central place in the thought of Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965), the paper reproduced in this chapter presents the results of his research into the general principles governing the oppositional nature of morphemic categories. Through this research, he arrived at a novel version of ‘markedness’, a central theoretical concept in structuralism. Originally developed by Jakobson and Trubetzkoy, markedness deals with the asymmetrical relationship in a pair of linguistic units belonging to the same paradigm, such as morphemes or phonemes, where one signals a distinctive feature (and is specific) while the other does not (being non-specific and inclusive). Hjelmslev’s formulation of markedness offered important insights into the epistemological underpinnings of this theoretical posit. This paper was composed in 1933 and expected to be published in the same year in the Bulletins of the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle, as Hjelmslev’s next major theoretical statement after his Principes de grammaire générale (1928), but, mysteriously, it did not appear until 1973, in the second volume of his Essais linguistiques. The reasons for this delay involve both external factors of human interaction and internal conceptual difficulties. The introductory essay first reconstructs the dynamics of the Copenhagen School, with a focus on the academic and private rivalries between Hjelmslev and Viggo Brøndal before dealing with the theoretical tensions between the similar and yet competing models of markedness developed by Hjelmslev and Brøndal. The introduction and notes to this chapter make extensive use of Hjelmslev’s correspondence and unpublished manuscripts held at the Royal Library of Copenhagen.