Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobsonwas a Russian–American linguist and literary theorist...
NationalityRussian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth11 October 1896
CountryRussian Federation
may language
Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.
progress language study
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.
symbolism sound language
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.
fundamentals bilingualism language
Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.
language poetic deaf
A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.
known time verbal
Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.
coming following instead latter perceived sound sounds
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.
acute capacity grave image opposition pointed suggest thin
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.
above meanings relation sounds structure task throw viewed
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.
strictly
From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.
acoustics sound mystery
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.
running taken giving
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.
light tasks speech
Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.
identity problem classification
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.