Hjelmslev and his semiotic legacy

The paper is about the reception of Louis Hjelmslev’s work by semioticians, from the 1960s to today. I emphasize the “French connection”, through which semioticians have inscribed Hjelmslev’s thought within the broader tradition of “saussurism”, a tradition which structuralism extends to other fields than Linguistics. This reception turned Hjelmslev’s work into a legacy, to be maintained (by publications), to be enhanced (by critical works) and to be developed through new theoretical perspectives and applications to objects other than languages. Hjelmslevian concepts promote a semantic analysis that differs from traditional lexicological study. Furthermore, they raise the level of abstraction of semiotic discourse and give it an “epistemological style”, as exemplified by Hjelmslev’s Prolegomena to a Theory of Language.