Jacobson

Jakobson, Roman(1896-1982)

     Jakobson, Roman, (1896-1982), Russian-American linguist. Jakobson was professor at the Higher Dramatic School, Moscow (1920-33) and Masarykova University, Brno, Czechoslovakia (1933-39) before moving to the US in 1941. There Jakobson was professor at Columbia Universtity (1943-49), Harvard (1950-67) and M.I.T. (1957-67). A leading authority on Slavic languages, he was the principal founder of Prague school of structural linguistics and of phonology. Author of Remarques sur l' évolution phonologique du russe (1929), Kharakteristichke yevrazi-yskogo yazykovogo soyuza (1931), Kinder-sprache (1941), Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (1941), Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (with G. Fant and M. Halle, 1952), Fundamentals of Language (1956).

    Jakobson announced in 1928 their criticism of the classical structuralist position of Ferdinand de Saussure. Whereas Saussure had insisted that the study of the structural relations within and between languages as they exist at any given time (synchonistic study) and the study of the changes in sounds and their relations over time (diachronic study) were completely separate and mutually exclusive, the Prague School said:

     “It is the structural analysis of language in the process of development—the analysis of children’s language and it’s general laws—and of language in the process of disintegration—aphasic language—which enables us to throw light on the selection of phonemes, the distinctive features, and their mutual relations, and to get closer to the main principles of this selection and of this interdependence so as to be in a position to establish and explain the universal laws which underlie the phonological structure of the world's languages”.[Lectures on Sound and Meaning, 1942]

     Jakobson also held that Saussure's key insight that sounds had an essentially arbitrary relation to meaning, meaning being determined by their stuctural relations with other sounds which differed in...