On Saussure and Hjelmslev, their Structural Viewpoints

Abstract

The nineteenth century is called the Golden Age of historico-comparative linguistics, while the early half of the twentieth the age of structural linguistics. The greatest theoretician of the new era, and the one who first elaborated the structural principle into a well-defined theory, was no doubt the eminent Swiss comparativist F. de Saussure. The Copenhagen school led by another renoun structuralist L. Hjelmslev is sometimes called neo-Saussurianism because no school has so strongly insisted that its roots are in Saussure's teaching as Hjelmslev's. Hjelmslev more than anyone else has the merit of acclaiming Saussure as the founder of linguistic structuralism.