The Copenhagen School

Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943)

he put forward a number of criteria for linguistic theory and its resulting descriptions to meet

linguistic theory should be immanent

—it should analyse language as a self-sufficient structure and it should also be arbitrary and appropriate

—it should aim to provide a procedure for description and this description should be consistent, adequate and simple

he elaborated dual dichotomies between form and substance and expression and content which interlock in his theory of the linguistic sign