Michelle Obama
lawyer and former First Lady of the United States
Roman Jakobson
Russian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
Roman Osipovich Jakobsonwas a Russian and naturalised American linguist and literary theorist.
A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century.
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About the Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobsonwas a Russian and naturalised American linguist and literary theorist.
A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics. He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce’s semiotics, as well as from communication theory and cybernetics, he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music, the visual arts, and cinema.
Through his decisive influence on Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, among others, Jakobson became a pivotal figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology and literary theory; his development of the approach pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, known as “structuralism”, became a major post-war intellectual movement in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, though the influence of structuralism declined during the 1970s, Jakobson’s work has continued to receive attention in linguistic anthropology, especially through the ethnography of communication developed by Dell Hymes and the semiotics of culture developed by Jakobson’s former student Michael Silverstein. Jakobson’s concept of underlying linguistic universals, particularly his celebrated theory of distinctive features, decisively influenced the early thinking of Noam Chomsky, who became the dominant figure in theoretical linguistics during the second half of the twentieth century.
18 Quotes by Roman Jakobson
- 1.
Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 2.
For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 3.
Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 4.
In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 5.
It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 6.
Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 7.
Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 8.
Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 9.
A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 10.
The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 11.
Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 12.
From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 13.
Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 14.
When I speak it is in order to be heard.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 15.
Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 16.
Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 17.
The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician
- 18.
At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.
Roman JakobsonRussian-American linguist, philosopher and semiotician