Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson (Russian: Ромáн Óсипович Якобсóн, romanized: Román Ósipovich Yakobson; Moscow, October 11, 1896 – Boston, July 18, 1982) was a Russian linguist, phonologist, and literary theorist.

Beginnings and professional career

It was in the city of Moscow that Roman Jakobson began to study oriental languages, at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages. Subsequently, he entered Moscow University and enrolled in the Faculty of Philology and History.

Russian Formalism prevailed at that time, an intellectual and literary movement born during the First World War, which consolidated the independence of literary theory and literary criticism as autonomous disciplines.

Jacobson had a relationship with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, another important Russian linguist and phonologist, with whom he mainly corresponded.

In the 1920s, he went to live in Prague, and soon began to work as a professor of Russian philology, specifically in 1923. He also worked as a professor of ancient Czech literature, years later, in 1937; he did it in Brno, a city in the Czech Republic.

He was researching in the field of philology, poetry, creation and language, and published his results in a series of installments: “The new Russian poetry” (1921) and “On Czech verse, with particular reference to Russian verse” (1923).

In 1930, Roman Jakobson defended his doctoral thesis in Prague. However, 9 years later, in 1939, he must flee the city because of the Nazi invasion, since he is Jewish. After his escape, Roman Jakobson works as a professor at different universities: specifically, in Uppsala, Oslo and Copenhagen. But in 1941 he must flee again, again due to the Nazi invasion. This time he emigrates to the United States.

Once there, he teaches at Harvard, Columbia, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It is in the United States where Jakobson focuses especially on the field of linguistics, as opposed to previous years, which were more poetic and focused on literary theory.

Theory

Roman Jakobson's career focused on the study of different literary phenomena. Other of his works that reflect this are: Observations on the prose of the poet Pasternak (1935) and Unknown Verses by Mayakovsky (1942). Jakobson's work, although considerable, is scattered and not systematized in major works. It consists of 475 titles, of which 374 are books and articles and 101 are various texts (poems, prefaces, introductions and newspaper articles). In addition, much of it has been done in collaboration with other authors. Until 1939 he was mainly concerned with the poetics and theory of literature. In the American years he mastered linguistics.

Jakobson was a theoretical researcher rather than an empirical one and is comfortable in multidisciplinarity. His work simultaneously touches the disciplines of anthropology, language pathology, stylistics, folklore, and information theory. For this reason, he turned to twenty different collaborators in different disciplines. His is the first modern definition of the phoneme: "Mental impression of a sound, minimal distinctive unit or minimal semantic vehicle". It reduces all possible phonological oppositions to only twelve: vowel/non-vocalic, consonantal/non-consonantal, compact/diffuse, voiced/non-voiced, nasal/oral, etc., which has raised many objections, especially due to its reductionist nature (an excessive tendency towards binary classifications, which do not always adjust to a more varied linguistic reality, is attributed to it). But he was a pioneer of diachronic phonology with his 1931 work.

Her research on children's language was also very innovative, highlighting the universal role that stops and nasals play in it. His studies on aphasias are also exemplary, suggestive and pioneering, in which he identifies two types of anomalies: those related to the selection of linguistic units or paradigmatic anomalies, and those related to the combination of the same, or syntagmatic anomalies, this model was partially inspired by the considerations of the father of structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure, since Jakobson in turn influenced structuralists as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan -Lacan understands, from Jakobson's studies related to aphasias, that the paradigmatic or selective is coalescent with what Sigmund Freud calls "condensation" and the metaphorical, and that the syntagmatic is metonymic or what Freud calls "displacement". This study sparked a passionate interest in neurologists and psychiatrists and a renewal of medical studies in this field.

Stylistics and poetics are undoubtedly Jakobson's oldest and deepest concerns. His theories were developed within Russian formalism, which was a reaction against a tradition of Russian literary theory excessively dominated by social aspects, and therefore attaches great importance to forms, from the simplest (phonic recurrences) to the most complex (literary genres). His theories are presented mainly in the not very extensive article & # 34; Linguistics and Poetics & # 34;, from 1960.

From his theory of information, established in 1958 and articulated around the factors of communication (sender, receiver, referent, channel, message and code), Jakobson deduced the existence of six functions of language: expressive, the appellative, the representative, the phatic, the poetic and the metalinguistic, thus completing the model of Karl Bühler.

This synthesis, so operative, has been widely used. In the opinion of some, it does not "solve" the functions of language, since it adds an aesthetic function and does not adequately explain the ludic function of language, which could easily be included within the poetic function. But this scheme is essential to analyze these other aspects later.

The speaker sends a message to the listener. To be operative, that message requires a context to which to refer to, capable of being captured by the listener with verbal capacity or of being captured by the listener and with verbal capacity or of being verbalized; a code common to the speaker and the listener, if not totally at least partially (or what is the same, an encoder and a decipherer of the message); and, finally, a contact, a transmission channel and a psychological connection between speaker and listener, which allows both to enter and remain in communication.

• Reference: is an orientation to the context, their primary task of numerous messages, the accessory participation of the other functions of such messages must be understood by the observer linguist.
• Emotive: Focused towards SpeakHe aspires to a direct expression of his attitude towards what he is saying. This tends to produce the impression of a certain emotion, whether true or fake.
• Feature: it has the purpose of bringing the interlocutors into linguistic contact, to put them in dialogue, if necessary, to go to the matter, to the point. Another of its functions is to verify the communication circuit, that is to verify that it is hearing us.
• Conativa: oriented towards listener, its function is its purest grammatical expression in the vocation and the imperative. The prayers of imperative differ fundamentally from the statements in which they are exposed to a test of truth and in turn the annunciative prayers can be converted into questions: "Did you drink?"
• Metalinguistic: has the practical usefulness for the speaker. Thanks to her, information is gathered about expressions or words that are not understood. "What is it?"
• Poetic: it is the one that is recognized in the orientation towards the message as such, the message by the message. Jakobson defined it as the one that projects the principle of the equivalence of the selection axis to the combination axis. It is a combination of signs organized in a statement, according to the rules of the language code, for the purpose of being emitted to a recipient through a channel. The purpose of this issue is that the message is decoded by the recipient, thus determining the communication as a relationship. "What you say is as important as the way you say it."

Jakobson also tried to extend the concept of binary opposition to other aspects of language, based on two studies of structural morphology Zur Struktur des russischen Verbums (1932) and Beitrag zur allgemeinen Kasuslehre (1936), and for this reason he was one of the first and one of the few to deal with diachronic phonology in Remarques sur l'évolution phonologique du russe comparée à celle des centers langues slaves (1929) and Prinzipien der historischen Phonologie (1931).

Works

• Notes on the phenological evolution of Russian compared to that of other Slavic languages, 1929
• Principles of Historical Phonology, 1931
• Contribution to the general theory of cases, 1936
• On the theory of phenological affinities between languages, 1938
• Children's language, aphasia and general phonetic lawsUpsala, 1941. Trad. Children ' s language and aphasiaAyuso, 1974
• The oral categories, 1950
• Fundamentals of LanguageThe Hague, 1956, with Morris Halle. Trad. Basics of Language, Science New, 1967
• Linguistics and Poetics: Closing Statement (in Style in LanguageThomas Sebeok, ed., 1960. Trad. Language style Madrid, Chair, 1974
• Essais de linguistique généraleParis, 1963. Trad. General language testing, collection of eleven of its articles produced in the United States and after 1950
• Essais de linguistique générale, IIParis, 1973. Continuation of the previous
• The Maiakovski caseIcaria, 1977
• Policy questionsSeuil, 1973. Trad. Poetry testingFCE, 1977, or. 1973
• DialoguesFlammarion, 1980. Trad. Linguistics, poetics, timeCritics, 1981, or. 1980, important interview with Krystina Pomorska
• Language in Literature 1980
• Russie folie poésie, Seuil, 1986, presented by Tzvetan Todorov
• The sound form of the tongue" (in conjunction with Linda Waugh), Mexico, FCE, 1987
• Comments on the prose of the poet Pasternak, 1935
• Unknown versa of Maiakovski , 1942

Legacy

Jakobson's three main ideas in linguistics play important roles in the field to this day: linguistic typology, markup, and linguistic universals. The three concepts are closely intertwined: typology is the classification of languages in terms of shared grammatical features (as opposed to shared origin), markup is (very roughly) a study of how certain forms of grammatical organization are more "optimized" than others, and linguistic universals are the study of the general characteristics of languages in the world. He also influenced the paradigmatic analysis of Nicolas Ruwet.

Jakobson has also influenced the four-sided model of Friedemann Schulz von Thun, as well as the metapragmatics of Michael Silverstein, the ethnography of communication and ethnopoetics of Dell Hymes, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, and the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben.

Jakobson's legacy among researchers specializing in Slavs, and especially Slavic linguistics in North America, has been enormous, for example, in Olga Yokoyama.