The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933. In 1939 the Prague and the Copenhagen Schools founded the magazine Acta Linguistica that had been for several years the international magazine of Structural Linguistics. In the early thirties the conception of the Copenhagen School was given the name of the Copenhagen School of "Glossematics"
In 1943 Hjelmslev published his main work Principles of Linguistics, which was translated into English and appeared in Baltimore in 1953.
Glossematics thought was to give a more exact definition of the object of linguistics. The two sides of the linguistic sign recognised by de-Saussure are considered by Hjelmslev to have both form and substance. This leads to the recognition of a bilateral character of the two planes—' the plane of content' and 'the plane of expression', namely:
substance – human thoughts
plane of content
form-meanings, lexical and grammatical
language
form-linguistic forms
plane of expression
substance – sounds, letters,
The object of the linguistic science is limited to the two inner layers—the form in the plane of content and the form in the plane of expression, i.e., linguistics studies nothing but form.
The form in the plane of content is the segmentation of the picture of the world, which is different in different languages, e.g.
| English: | blue | Foot, leg | Hand, arm |
| Russian: | синий, голубой | нога | рука |
Similar differences may be easily found in tense and case-systems, in the expression of genders in different languages, etc.
The two inner layers are connected by the 'law of commutation,' which means that differences in the plane of expression signal differences in the plane of content. There is no simple one-to-one correspondence of the two planes. The units of the planes may be decomposed into smaller components which reveal the correspondences of the two planes.
II. Practical tasks
Do these exercises according to the tasks.
1. Give Ukrainian the following things:
table, chair, book, pencil, horse, dog, dress, hat. boy, girl and give other examples to show that the linguistic sign is absolutely arbitrary
2. Translate into mother tongue:
horse, horse and foot, horse-path
top, the top of the class, at the top of one's voice, room at the top hand.
sleeve, tame
word, closing speech, not a syllable, according to his story, in short
Give other examples to show the relative motivation of linguistic signs in different languages.
3. Find the equivalents for the English:
time, tense; table; clock, watch; meal; 24 hours
and the English equivalents for the mother tongue
человек, дерево, дело, сутки
4 Compare the English Conditional Mood with the Ukrainian Subjunctive (сослагательное наклонение) and state the difference in grammatical meanings.
5. Prove that the English Possessive Case is not equivalent to the Russian Genitive (родительный падеж).
6. Translate into your mother tongue:
1. He cut his finger. You finger this and find that. 2. He walked round the house. He failed to round the lamp-post. He took his daily round. The ladder has many rounds.
