Viggo Brøndal

Rasmus Viggo Brøndal (13 October 1887, Copenhagen - 14 December 1942, Copenhagen) was a Danish philologist and professor of Romance languages and literature at Copenhagen University.

He was also a founder of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.

Danish linguist and language philosopher. Brøndal received a traditional education in philology but showed an early concern for theoretical problems. The Danish philosopher Harald Høffding introduced him to the theory and history of philosophical categories, which was to be the basis of his theory of structural linguistics. This background made him receptive to the ideas of the prestructuralists (such as Antoine Meillet) during his studies in Paris (1912–1913). He read Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale immediately after its publication as he was proofreading the final version of his sociologically oriented thesis on language history (Substrater og Laan i Romansk og Germansk, 1917). Elements from Saussure were footnoted in his book.

In 1928, Brøndal was appointed professor of Romance languages at the University of Copenhagen, where he taught until 1942. Louis Hjelmslev and Brøndal soon became the main figures in Danish structural linguistics. Brøndal was in close contact with the Prague Linguistic Circle, especially Roman Jakobson, and was active in establishing the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle in 1931. He founded Acta Linguistica with Hjelmslev in 1939.

The basic problem Brøndal addressed in his linguistics was the relationship between thought and language. He elaborated a universal grammar that united linguistics and logic along the principles of modern structural linguistics. For Brøndal, Saussure's structural linguistics was such an attempt. The grammatical doctrine of Brøndal is outlined in his major work, Ordklasserne (1928), and in “Langage et logique” (1937) and “Linguistique structurale” (1939), both reprinted in Essais de linguistique générale (1943, with Brøndal's annotated bibliography). His universal grammar was supposed to contain all the principles for the deduction of the specific elements of language at different levels and for their relations to nonlinguistic facts, as far as those elements and those relations could express the relation between language and thought. Both the universal and the language‐specific grammars contain four dimensions: morphology, syntax, symbolic, and logic. The two latter dimensions cover the linguistic expression and the linguistic content, respectively.

...
Wikipedia