Roman Jakobson
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Roman Osipovich Jakobson, (Russian, Роман Осипович Якобсон), (11 October 1896 – 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Formalist school. He became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.
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[edit] Life and work
Jakobson was born to a well-to-do family in Russia of Jewish descent, and he developed a fascination with language at a very young age. As a student he was a leading figure of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and took part in Moscow's active world of avant-garde art and poetry. 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.
1920 was a year of political upheaval in Russia, and Jakobson relocated to Prague as a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission to continue his doctoral studies. He immersed himself both into the academic and cultural life of pre-war Czechoslovakia and established close relationships with a number of Czech poets and literary figures. He also made an impression on Czech academics with his studies of Czech verse. In 1926, together with Vilém Mathesius and others he became one of the founders of the "Prague school" of linguistic theory (other members included Nikolai Trubetzkoi, René Wellek, Jan Mukařovský). There his numerous works on phonetics helped continue to develop his concerns with the structure and function of language. Jakobson's universalizing structural-functional theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, was the first successful solution of a plane of linguistic analysis according to the Saussurean hypotheses. (This theory achieved its most canonical exposition in a book co-authored with Morris Halle.) This mode of analysis has been since applied to the plane of Saussurean sense by his protegé Michael Silverstein in a series of foundational articles in functionalist linguistic typology.
Jakobson left Prague at the start of WWII for Scandinavia, where he was associated with the Copenhagen linguistic circle, and such thinkers as Louis Hjelmslev. As the war advanced west, he fled to New York City to become part of the wider community of intellectual émigrés who fled there. He was also closely associated with the Czech emigree community during that period. At the École libre des hautes études, a sort of Francophone university-in-exile, he met and collaborated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would also become a key exponent of structuralism. He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, Benjamin Whorf, and Leonard Bloomfield. He became a consultant to the International Auxiliary Language Association, which would present Interlingua in 1951.
In 1949 Jakobson moved to Harvard University, where he remained until retirement. In his last decade he 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 whole.
[edit] The communication functions
Based on the Organon-Model by Karl Bühler, Jakobson distinguishes six communication functions, each associated with a dimension of the communication process:
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". [The exact and complete explanation of this principle is beyond the scope of this article.] 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. A famous example of this principle is the political slogan "I like Ike." Jakobson's theory of communicative functions was first published in "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics" (in Thomas A. Sebeok, Style In Language, Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960, p. 350-377).
[edit] Legacy
Jakobson's three principal ideas in linguistics play a major role in the field to this day: linguistic typology, markedness, and linguistic universals. The three concepts are tightly intertwined: typology is the classification of languages in terms of shared grammatical features (as opposed to shared origin), markedness is (very roughly) a study of how certain forms of grammatical organization are more "natural" than others, and linguistic universals is the study of the general features of languages in the world. He also influenced Nicolas Ruwet's paradigmatic analysis and Friedemann Schulz von Thuns four sides model.
Jakobson's work has been an influence on the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben.
[edit] Bibliography
- by Jakobson
- Jakobson R., Remarques sur l'evolution phonologique du russe comparée à celle des autres langues slaves. Prague, 1929
- Jakobson R., K charakteristike evrazijskogo jazykovogo sojuza. Prague, 1930
- Jakobson R., Child Language, Aphasia and Phonological Universals, 1941
- Jakobson R., Style in Language (ed. Thomas Sebeok), 1960
- Jakobson R., Selected Writings, (ed. by Stephen Rudy). The Hague, Paris, Mouton in 6 volumes:
- I. Phonological Studies, 1971
- 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
- Jakobson R., Questions de poetique, 1973
- Jakobson R., Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time (ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy), 1985
- 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
- on Jakobson
- Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship. Ed. by Daniel Armstrong and Cornelis H. van Schooneveld, 1977
- Brooke-Rose C., A Structural Analysis of Pound's 'Usura Canto': Jakobson's Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse,1976
- Caton, Steve C. "Contributions of Roman Jakobson" Annual Review of Anthropology, vol 16: p. 223-260, 1987.
- Culler J., Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature, 1975
- Holenstein E., Roman Jakobson's Approach to Language, 1974
- Ihwe J., Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik. Ergebnisse und Perspektiven, 1971
- Kerbrat-Orecchioni C., L'Enonciation: De la subjectivite dans le langage, 1980
- Le Guern M., Semantique de la metaphore et de la metonymie, 1973
- Lodge D., The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, 1977
- Riffaterre M., Semiotics of Poetry, 1978
- Steiner P., Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics, 1984
- Todorov T., Poetique de la prose,1971
- Waugh L., Roman Jakobson's Science of Language, 1976
[edit] Sources
- Esterhill, Frank (2000). Interlingua Institute: A History. New York: Interlingua Institute.
- Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). Studying Popular Music. Philadelphia: Open University Press. ISBN 0-335-15275-9.
