Substance and structure in linguistics

For the old structuralists, the distinction between substance and structure (or form) made possible a definition of linguistics as an autonomous discipline dealing with structure. Moreover, it provided a means for simultaneously allowing for language-particular (structural) and universal (substance-related) aspects of language. With the fading of structuralist frameworks such as Hjelmslev’s and Ulldal’s Glossematics and the rise and increasing dominance of generative grammar in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the distinction between substance and structure fell into almost complete oblivion. However, the distinction lived on in some scholarly environments and recent years have witnessed a revitalization of the distinction. As one example, Danish Functional Linguistics – a research community established in the 1990’s – have adopted  Hjelmslev’s version of the distinction and stress the importance of the structuralist distinction between substance and structure, while at the same diverging from the old structuralists by including substance in the focus of linguistics.

Read more here: https://inss.ku.dk/english/calendar/substance-and-structure-seminar/