Hjelmslev's Glossematics: A source of inspiration to Systemic Functional Linguistics?

Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) often pays tribute to one of the great 20th century figures in European Linguistics, Louis Hjelmslev, and his theory of Glossematics. This is surprising because Glossematics is a formally oriented, strictly immanent approach to language while SFL is a functional theory focusing on language as a social semiotic. This paper offers an examination of both theories and attempts to trace similarities and differences on a number of issues with which they share a theoretical concern: the role of paradigmatic relations, the notions of function, text, stratification and immanence, and the overall descriptive goals in linguistics. The paper concludes that except for the basic recognition of the primacy of paradigmatic relations and the abstract idea of the stratification of the content plane, there is little or no similarity between Glossematics and SFL. In fact, many of the references to Glossematics in SFL writings may give the reader an inaccurate impression of Hjelmslev. More generally, while accepting that finding inspiration in a theory does not necessarily involve an obligation to remain faithful to that theory, the paper argues that we all still owe it to earlier generations of scholars to recognize their work for what it really was.