Glossematics

Glossematics is a structuralist linguistic theory of the twentieth century proposed by Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev. It defines the glosseme as the most basic unit or component of language. The glosseme is defined as the smallest irreducible unit of both the content and expression planes of language; in the expression plane, the glosseme is said to be identical or nearly identical to the phoneme, whereas it is stressed that traditional analyses have not adequately revealed the basic units of the content plane of languages.