Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist, literary theorist, and semiotician. He was a founding figure in the development of structuralist analysis in linguistics and is considered one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century. Jakobson was also a pioneer in the field of phonology and contributed to the development of the structuralist approach to the study of language and communication.
What is the most famous quote by Roman Jakobson ?
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 Jakobson
What can you learn from Roman Jakobson (Life Lessons)
- Roman Jakobson's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the relationship between language, culture, and communication. He believed that language can be used to express ideas and emotions in ways that are unique to each culture.
- Jakobson's work also highlights the importance of understanding the structure of language and how it is used to communicate meaning. He argued that language is composed of various elements, such as phonemes, morphemes, and syntax, and that these elements must be understood in order to effectively communicate.
- Finally, Jakobson's work emphasizes the importance of context when interpreting language, as the same words can have different meanings depending on the context in which they are used.
The most beautiful Roman Jakobson quotes to get the best of your day
Following is a list of the best Roman Jakobson quotes, including various Roman Jakobson inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Roman Jakobson.
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.
Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.
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.
Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.
What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?
Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.
The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.
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.
Linguistic quotes by Roman Jakobson
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.
A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.
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.
A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.
From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.
Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.
Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.
The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.
Quotations by Roman Jakobson that are structuralism and poetics
At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.
Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.
When I speak it is in order to be heard.
Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.