[...] it would seem to be a justifiable experiment to compare different languages and then extract, or subtract, the factor that is common to them and that remains common to all languages, however many languages are drawn into the comparison. [...] this factor will be an entity defined only by its having function to the structural principle of language and to all the factors that make languages different from one another. This common factor we call ‘purport’.
- Hjelmslev (1961), a pag.50

[...] the purport is formed in a specific fashion in each language, and therefore no universal formation is found, but only a universal principle of formation.
- Hjelmslev (1961), a pag.76

[...] the purport, the thought itself.
- Hjelmslev (1961), a pag.50

By a ‘purport’ we understand a class of variables which manifest more than one chain under more than one syntagmatic, and/or more than one paradigm under more than one paradigmatic.
- Hjelmslev (1961), a pag.109

Each language lays down its own boundaries within the amorphous “thought-mass” and stresses different factors in it in different arrangements, puts the centers of gravity in different places and gives them the different emphases. It is like one and the same handful of sand that is formed in quite different patterns, or like the cloud in the heavens that changes shape in Hamlet’s view from minute to minute. Just as the same sand can be put into different molds, and the same cloud take on ever new shapes, so also the same purport is formed or structured differently in different languages. What determines its form is solely the functions of the language, the sign function and the functions deducible therefrom. Purport remains, each time, substance for a new form, and has no possible existence except through being substance for one form or another.
- Hjelmslev (1961), a pag.52