Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson (Russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н, IPA: [rɐˈman ˈosʲɪpəvʲɪt͡ɕ (j)ɪkɐpˈson]; 11 October [O.S. 29 September] 1896 – 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.

A pioneer of

The linguistics of the time was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and insisted that the only scientific study of language was to study the history and development of words across time (the diachronic approach, in Saussure's terms). Jakobson, on the other hand, had come into contact with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and developed an approach focused on the way in which language's structure served its basic function (synchronic approach) – to communicate information between speakers. Jakobson was also well known for his critique of the emergence of sound in film. Jakobson received a master's degree from Moscow University in 1918.^[2]

In Czechoslovakia

Although he was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, Jakobson soon became disillusioned as his early hopes for an explosion of creativity in the arts fell victim to increasing state conservatism and hostility.^[5] He left Moscow for Prague in 1920, where he worked as a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission while continuing with his doctoral studies. Living in Czechoslovakia meant that Jakobson was physically close to the linguist who would be his most important collaborator during the 1920s and 1930s, Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who fled Russia at the time of the Revolution and took up a chair at Vienna in 1922. In 1926 the Prague school of linguistic theory was established by the professor of English at Charles University, Vilém Mathesius, with Jakobson as a founding member and a prime intellectual force (other members included Nikolai Trubetzkoy, René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský). Jakobson immersed himself in both the academic and cultural life of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia and established close relationships with a number of Czech poets and literary figures. Jakobson received his Ph.D. from Charles University in 1930.^[2] He became a professor at Masaryk University in Brno in 1933. He also made an impression on Czech academics with his studies of Czech verse.

Roman Jakobson proposed the Atlas Linguarum Europae in the late 1930s, but World War II disrupted this plan and it laid dormant until being revived by Mario Alinei in 1965.^[6]

Escapes before the war

Jakobson escaped from Prague in early March 1939

In New York, he began teaching at

In his last decade, Jakobson maintained an office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an honorary professor emeritus. In the early 1960s, Jakobson shifted his emphasis to a more comprehensive view of language and began writing about communication sciences as a whole. He converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 1975.^[10]

Jakobson died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on 18 July 1982.^[2][11] His widow died in 1986. His first wife, who was born in 1908, died in 2000.

Intellectual contributions

According to Jakobson's own personal reminiscences, the most decisive stage in the development of his thinking was the period of revolutionary anticipation and upheaval in Russia between 1912 and 1920, when, as a young student, he fell under the spell of the celebrated Russian futurist wordsmith and linguistic thinker Velimir Khlebnikov.^[12]

Offering a slightly different picture, the preface to the second edition of The Sound Shape of Language argues that this book represents the fourth stage in "Jakobson's quest to uncover the function and structure of sound in language."^[13] The first stage was roughly the 1920s to 1930s where he collaborated with Trubetzkoy, in which they developed the concept of the phoneme, and elucidated the structure of phonological systems. The second stage, from roughly the late 1930s to the 1940s, during which he developed the notion that "binary distinctive features" were the foundational element in language, and that such distinctiveness is "mere otherness" or differentiation.^[13] In the third stage in Jakobson's work, from the 1950s to 1960s, he worked with the acoustician C. Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle (a student of Jakobson's) to consider the acoustic aspects of distinctive features.

The communication functions

Influenced by the

1. referential (: contextual information)
2. aesthetic/poetic (: auto-reflection)
3. emotive (: self-expression)
4. conative (: vocative or imperative addressing of receiver)
5. phatic (: checking channel working)
6. metalingual (: checking code working)[14]

One of the six functions is always the dominant function in a text and usually related to the type of text. In poetry, the dominant function is the poetic function: the focus is on the message itself. The true hallmark of poetry is according to Jakobson "the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination". Very broadly speaking, it implies that poetry successfully combines and integrates form and function, that poetry turns the poetry of grammar into the grammar of poetry, so to speak. Jakobson's theory of communicative functions was first published in "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics" (in

• Jakobson R., Remarques sur l'évolution phonologique du russe comparée à celle des autres langues slaves. Prague, 1929 (Annotated English translation by Ronald F. Feldstein: Remarks on the Phonological Evolution of Russian in Comparison with the Other Slavic Languages. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA and London, 2018).[16]
• Jakobson R., K charakteristike evrazijskogo jazykovogo sojuza. Prague, 1930.
• Jakobson R., Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals, 1941.
• Jakobson R., On Linguistic Aspects of Translation, essay, 1959.
• Jakobson R., "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics", in Style in Language (ed. Thomas Sebeok), 1960.
• Jakobson R., Selected Writings (ed. Stephen Rudy). The Hague, Paris, Mouton, in six volumes (1971–1985):
  • I. Phonological Studies, 1962;
  • II. Word and Language, 1971;
  • III. The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry, 1980;
  • IV. Slavic Epic Studies, 1966;
  • V. On Verse, Its Masters and Explores, 1978;
  • VI. Early Slavic Paths and Crossroads, 1985;
  • VII. Contributions to Comparative Mythology, 1985;
  • VIII. Major Works 1976–1980. Completion Volume 1, 1988;
  • IX.1. Completion, Volume 2/Part 1, 2013;
  • IX.1. Completion, Volume 2/Part 2, 2014.
• Jakobson R., Questions de poetique, 1973.
• Jakobson R., Six Lectures of Sound and Meaning, 1978.
• Jakobson R., The Framework of Language, 1980.
• Jakobson R., Halle M., Fundamentals of Language, 1956.
• Jakobson R., Waugh L., The Sound Shape of Language, 1979.
• Jakobson R., Pomorska K., Dialogues, 1983.
• Jakobson R., Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time (ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy), 1985.
• Jakobson R., Language in Literature (ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy), 1987.
• Jakobson R. "Shifters and Verbal Categories". On Language (ed. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston). 1990. 386–392.
• Jakobson R., La Génération qui a gaspillé ses poètes, Allia, 2001.

Notes