Roman Jakobson

10 Key excerpts on "Roman Jakobson"

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  Modern Criticism and Theory

  A Reader

  • Nigel Wood, David Lodge(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8 Roman Jakobson

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315835488-8

  Introductory note

  Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) was one of the most powerful minds in twentieth-century intellectual history, though general recognition of this fact came rather late in his long life. He was born in Russia and was a founder-member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle which played a major part in the development of Russian formalism. At this time, Jakobson was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian futurist poets, and he never lost this commitment to modernist experiment and innovation. In 1920, he moved to Czechoslovakia and helped to found the Prague Linguistic Circle, which was the source of some of the important foundation work in structuralist linguistics and poetics. The Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939 forced Jakobson to move on again, and in 1941 he arrived in the United States, where he lived until his death, teaching at Columbia, Harvard and MIT.

  Most of Jakobson’s published work consists of highly technical articles on matters of grammar and phonology, expecially in Slavonic languages. But he was able to apply his immense learning and speculative intelligence to theoretical questions of universal interest and importance, and to incisive linguistic analysis of classic literary texts in English and French. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose work gave such a powerful impetus to structuralism in the 1960s (see ‘Incest and Myth’, section 40 in 20th Century Literary Criticism), acknowledged his indebtedness to the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson, and the two men collaborated on an analysis of Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Chats’, published in the journal L’Homme in 1962, which acquired considerable fame, or notoriety, as a set piece of structuralist criticism (especially after Michael Riffaterre’s critique of it in Yale French Studies in 1966 ).

  Two ideas in Jakobson’s contribution to modern literary theory deserve special mention. One was his identification of the rhetorical figures, metaphor and metonymy, as models for two fundamental ways of organizing discourse that can be traced in every kind of cultural production. (See ‘The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles’, reprinted below, pp. 165–68, an extract from ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’ in Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language [1956].) The other was his attempt to understand ‘literariness’ – to define in linguistic terms what makes a verbal message a work of art. This was a preoccupation of the Russian formalists from the inception of the movement, but in ‘Linguistics and Poetics’, reprinted below, we find a lucid exposition of Jakobson’s mature thought on the subject, enlivened and illuminated by a staggering range of illustration. This paper was first delivered as a ‘Closing Statement’ to a conference on ‘Style in Language’ held at Indiana University in 1958, and is reprinted here from the proceedings of that conference, edited by Thomas Sebeok, and published under the title Style in Language

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  Phonological Studies

  • Roman Jakobson(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Language 62:846-878. 1990. Roman Jakobson: His Life, Work and Influence. In Roman Jakobson, On Language, eds. L. R. Waugh and M. Monville-Burston, 1 -4 5 . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Waugh, Linda R. and Madeleine Newfield. 1995. Iconicity in the Lexicon and its Relevance for a Theory of Morphology. In Syntactic Iconicity and Linguistic Freezes: The Human Dimension, ed. M. Landsberg, 189-221. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Waugh, Linda R. and Stephen Rudy, eds. 1991. News Vistas in Grammar: Invariance and Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 1998. Jakobson and Structuralism. In Semiotics: a Handbook on the Sign-Theoretic Foundations of Nature and Cultur/Semiotik: Ein Handbuch zu den zeichentheoretischen Grundlagen von Natur und Kultur , eds. R. Posner et al., 2:2256-2271. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Weber, Jean Jacques, ed. 1996. The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jakobson to the Present. New York: Arnold. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York; The Hague: Mouton. Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change. In Directions for Historical Linguistics, eds. W.P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel, 95-188. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wellek, René. 1969. The Literary Theory and Aesthetics of the Prague School. Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications. Wellek, René and Austin Warren. 1956. Theory of Literature. 3rd ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World. XCVIII REFERENCES Wescott, Roger. 1971. Linguistic Iconism. Language 47:416-428. 1973. Tonal Icons in Bini. Studies in African Linguistics 4:197-205. Whaley, Lindsay. 1997. Introduction to Typology. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage. White, Hayden. 1978. Tropics of Discourse. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Widdowson, H.G. 1979. Explorations in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press. Winner, Thomas. 1987. The Aesthetic Semiotics of Roman Jakobson. In Pomor-ska et al.

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  Language, Poetry and Poetics

  The Generation of the 1890s: Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Majakovskij. Proceedings of the First Roman Jakobson Colloquium, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 5–6, 1984

  • Krystyna Pomorska, Elzbieta Chodakowska, Hugh McLean, Brent Vine, Krystyna Pomorska, Elzbieta Chodakowska, Hugh McLean, Brent Vine(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  EDWARD STANKIEWICZ The Major Moments of Jakobson's Linguistics Two years have now passed since the death of Roman Jakobson, and it is fitting that his students, followers and friends should meet here at MIT, where he spent the last fifteen years of his creative life, to assess some of his contributions to linguistics and to related disciplines. I say some of his contributions, because the range, depth and diversity of Jakobson's work cannot be discussed in a limited space and would in any case elude the competence of a single individual. The full significance of Jakobson's contribution must still await the test of time, though various facets of his work have been discussed in a number of excellent monographs and articles, including the comprehensive Retrospects written by Jakobson himself. By mentioning the proverbial test of time I do not mean to imply that the importance of his work will diminish or fade, but rather that it will be seen in a sharper light. Modern linguistics has produced, as is known, a number of competing theories and schools, and one will no doubt need perspective to distinguish the lasting contributions to our knowledge from ephemeral theories that are often accompanied by the clamor of the marketplace. But no matter how the future will judge Jakobson's overall oeuvre, two of its features stand out even now and are bound to give it lasting resonance and strength: its broad, all-encompassing concep-tion of language, and the view that language constitutes a fundamen-tal (or the fundamental) form of human behavior. The first feature prevented Jakobson from isolating one aspect or level of language (whether phonology or syntax) as the only area worthy of scholarly inquiry, whereas the second enabled him to treat language not merely as a God-given gift, or as a mental endowment, but as an instrument of culture which men use for the sake of knowledge, socialization and aesthetic expression.

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  Language in Literature

  Style and Foregrounding

  • Geoffrey Leech(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Stylistics and functionalism

  8.1 Roman Jakobson: a formalistic functionalist

  In his admirable critique of Jakobson's 'Closing Statement' of the 1958 'Style in Language' conference, Derek Attridge1 has already discussed the model of linguistic functions presented by Jakobson in that memorable paper. The sections in which Jakobson discussed the functions of language also, naturally enough, form the pretext (or pre-text) for this chapter, which is on the theme of stylistics and functionalism.

  These two terms ‘stylistics’ and ‘functionalism’ I will define simplistically for the present purpose as follows: stylistics is the study of style (particularly in literary texts, and more particularly, with a view to explicating the relation between the form of the text and its potential for interpretation).2 Functionalism (in the study of language) is an approach which tries to explain language not only internally, in terms of its formal properties, but also externally, in terms of what language contributes to larger systems of which it is a part or subsystem. Whether we call these larger systems ‘cultures’, ‘social systems’, ‘belief systems’, etc. does not concern me. What is significant is that functionalist explanations look for relations between language and what is not language, whereas formalist explanations look for relations between the elements of linguistic text itself.

  It is commonly assumed, as I have just assumed, that functionalism is defined by contrast with its opposite, formalism. It is strange, then, that Jakobson, who provides us with one of the best-known classifications of language functions, should also, in his analyses of literary texts, be the most successful and influential practitioner of formalism. The basis of this paradox lies in Jakobson’s well-known definition of the poetic function as ‘the set (Einstellung ) towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake’ (Sebeok 1960: 356). It will be remembered that Jakobson’s typology of functions attributed a different function to each of the six components in an archetypal linguistic situation. Think of such a situation as one in which an ADDRESSER sends a linguistics MESSAGE to an ADDRESSEE

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  Approaches to Poetics

  • (Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  V I C T O R E R L I C H Roman Jakobson-. Qrammar 0/ Poetry and Poetry of Qrammar N A M U C H C I T E D theoretical paper Roman Jakobson advanced the following thesis: Textbooks believe in the occurrence of poems devoid of imagery. But actually scarcity in lexical tropes is counterbalanced by gorgeous grammatical tropes and figures. The poetic resources concealed in the mor-phological and syntactic structure of language, briefly, the po-etry of grammar and its literary product, the grammar of poetry, have been seldom known to critics and mostly disregarded by linguists, but skillfully mastered by creative writers. 1 The poetry of grammar and the grammar of poetry. This dual formula has been for over three decades now the leitmotif of Jakobson's wide-ranging structural analyses of poetry. Sev-eral factors can be held responsible for Jakobson's increasing preoccupation with what one of his favorite English poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, has called the figure of grammar. A leading exponent of Formalist-Structuralist poetics, Jakob-son had always been sharply critical of the traditional overem-1 Linguistics and Poetics, in Style in Language, ed. Thomas A . Sebeok (New York, i960), p. 375. 2 VICTOR ERLICH phasis on lexical tropes. In the early days of Russian Formalism his spirited challenge to the view of poetry as thinking in im-ages was couched in Futurist or, if one will, Dadaist terms. Poetic speech, argued Jakobson in his pioneering study, Modern Russian Poetry (1921), tends toward its ultimate limit—the phonetic or, more exactly, the euphonic word. 2 Yet before long the fixation on sheer sound in the Formalist writings yielded to a broader and more mature notion of po-etic discourse whose hallmark, it was now felt, lay not in the absence of meaning but in the multiplicity of meanings. The aim of poetry, wrote Boris Eikhenbaum, is to make percepti-ble the texture of the word in all its aspects.

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  Literature as Communication and Cognition in Bakhtin and Lotman

  • Allan Reid(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Poetics Today 1, 3 (1980), 7-25.

  61. As far as I know there is no definitive biography of Jakobson to date, although I have not tried overly hard to locate one, but there are many briefer references concerning his life and work. For a small sample of the esteem in which he was and is held by his peers see A Tribute to Roman Jakobson. 1896-1982 . (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton, 1983). There have also, of course, been numerous Festschriften and collections of articles including, e.g. Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship , ed. Daniel Armstrong and C.H. van Schooneveld, (Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press, 1977), and Roman Jakobson, Verbal Art. Verbal Sign. Verbal Time , ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, (Minneapolis: University of •Minnesota Press, 1985).

  62. Cf. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, Preface to Verbal Art. Verbal Sign. Verbal Time ,: "Roman Jakobson . .. ranks among the seminal thinkers who shaped the 'human sciences' in the twentieth century." vii.

  63. Cf. Ibid., viii, C.H, van Schooneveld, "By Way of Introduction: Roman Jakobson's Tenets and Their Potential," in Roman Jakobson. 1, and Roman Jakobson, ' ." in Poetics-poetvka-poètika. (Warsaw: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe; Gravenhage: Mouton & Co.'S, 1961), 397-417.

  64. Jakobson. 30.

  65. Jakobson, "What is Poetry?" in Semiotics of Art . 174.

  66. See especially Jakobson, "Linguistics and Poetics," in Style in Language , ed. Thomas Sebeok, (New York: John Wiley, 1960), 350-77.

  67. Cf. "Linguistics and Communication Theory," in Selected Writings. II, (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 570-571.1 am speculating about the causal relationship, but it seems probable.

  68. See also Jakobson, "The Dominant," and Linda R. Waugh, "The Poetic Function and the Nature of Language," in Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time , 143-168.

  69. And cybernetics. I have in mind such fundamental notions and terms as sender, receiver, message, medium, code, channel, and so on, A comparison of Jakobson's model with Shannon and Weaver's is very suggestive, although I am not aware of any studies in which the two models are confronted. Cf. Warren Weaver, "Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication," in Claude E. Shannon and Warren Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication

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  Structuralist Poetics

  Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature

  • Jonathan Culler(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 then the linguist might contribute to literary studies by showing what properties of language were being exploited in particular texts and how they were extended or reorganized. The claim that this activity might be central to the study of literature is part of a general position shared by the Russian formalists, the Prague aestheticians, and contemporary structuralists; and the link between these groups – the man who has done more than anyone else to sustain this claim – is Roman Jakobson, whose theoretical statements and practical analyses are the basic texts of that variety of structuralism which seeks to apply the techniques of structural linguistics directly to the language of poems.

  Since literature is first of all language and since structuralism is a method based on linguistics, the most likely meeting place, as Genette observes, is that of the linguistic material itself (Figures, p. 149). The linguist might analyse the phonological, syntactic, and semantic structures of sentences in poems, but it would be left to the critic to analyse the special functions this linguistic material acquires when it is organized as a poem. Jakobson insists, however, that such restrictions on the role of linguistics ‘are based on an outmoded prejudice which either takes away from linguistics its fundamental aim, that is to say the study of the verbal form in relation to its functions, or else cedes to linguistic analysis only one of the diverse functions of language: the referential function’ (

  Questions de poétique

  , p. 485). All instances of language fulfil at least one of the six functions: the referential, the emotive, the phatic, the conative, the metalingual and the poetic. And the linguist cannot neglect one of these six if he would achieve a comprehensive theory of language. Indeed, for Jakobson poetics is an integral part of linguistics and can be defined as ‘the linguistic study of the poetic function in the context of verbal messages in general and in poetry in particular’ (ibid.,

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  Semiotics and City Poetics

  Jakobson’s Theory and Praxis

  • Mary Coghill(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  Paul Kiparsky (1983), stresses the semiotic (as opposed to strictly linguistic aspect) of Jakobson’s poetic function. He briefly describes Jakobson’s development from his early comparative linguistic theory, and addresses many of the questions regarding the criticism of Jakobson’s theories that are frequently raised. He agrees that linguistics is a central part of Jakobson’s theories, but that linguistics needs to broaden its scope in order to fully understand Jakobson. He quotes Jakobson’s fundamental definition of “poetic function” (1983: 21) and adds: “That is to say, the syntagmatic recurrence of paradigmatically equivalent linguistic elements is the constitutive element of poetic form” (1983: 21). Kiparsky identifies Jakobson’s interpretation of the metaphoric and metonymic axes in terms of a grammatical structure. His is not a linguistic analysis; this is a model that has semiotic scope. Kiparsky writes: An immediate consequence of this generalization is that principles like parallelism, the regular recurrence of syntactic patterns, which in traditional poetics stand out as exotic oddities, fall right into line as the predicted syntactic counterparts of metrical organization. . . . Thus, one corollary of Jakobson’s idea is that it opens the way to an understanding of the grammatical texture of poetry, bringing to view a whole facet of poetic form of which traditional literary scholarship had only a dim and intuitive notion. (1983: 21) He goes on to say that equivalence can also occur in any linguistic category, for example: syntax, morphology, lexicology. This point is important because it clarifies the difference between Jakobson’s own understanding of relational similarity (see Waugh, 1980, and below) which is not to be confused with similarity established through simple categories such as identical parts of speech (prepositions for example)

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  Structural Models and African Poetics

  Towards a Pragmatic Theory of Literature

  • Sunday O. Anozie(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  This teleological view which consists in the belief in a system of logical oppositions latent in any mode of human aesthetic and linguistic communication, should be considered therefore if not as the basis of Jakobson’s poetics, at least as an essential part of it. Its importance lies in the fact that it outlines the perspective of this poetics as that of the constitution of a semiology. Originally envisaged by de Saussure — as a general science of signs, charged with defining the laws of creation and transformation of signs including their meanings and forming also an essential part of sociology — semiology, for Jakobson, is expansive and all-embracing in scope. It embraces, for example, the range of ideomorphic, or sign systems which may be said to be indirectly related to the linguistic system. For this reason Jakobson thinks fit to subject semiology to the same theory of communication of messages involving a fixation upon the six functions: referent, code, addresser, addressee, contact, and, eventually, the message. In particular, Jakobson observes:

  A comparative analysis of structures determined by a predominant fixation upon the message (artistic function) or, in other words, a parallel investigation of verbal, musical, pictorial, choreographic, theatrical, and filmic arts, belong to the most imperative and fruitful duties of the semiotic science.27

  Later we shall see how this centrality of position accorded to semiotics within the total science of communication together with the privileged role accorded to linguistics over and above all other semiotic provinces, has constituted indeed the main thrust of Jakobson’s poetics — a science which he has described cogently as an ‘inquiry into the poetic function of language and into verbal art with respect to the poetic function of language as well as to the artistic function of semiotic systems in general.’28

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  Sign, System and Function

  Papers of the First and Second Polish-American Semiotics Colloquia

  • Jerzy Pelc, Thomas A. Sebeok, Edward Stankiewicz, Thomas G. Winner, Jerzy Pelc, Thomas A. Sebeok, Edward Stankiewicz, Thomas G. Winner(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The reason was that Lotman focused his investigations of poetry on the lower lin-guistic or paralinguistic levels of the structure of a text and he has not used the categories of sujet (theme) and represented world. Lotman's theory of poetic language is thus a relatively autonomous, as well as the most developed, part of his semiotic theory of art. As early as 1964, in the book mentioned above, Lotman clearly defined his program as 'an effort to invent functional models of art'; he made direct refer-ences to the idea, set forth in works by Tynianov, Shklovski, and Gukovski, of considering a work of literature as a functional structure. We read, 'The subject of analysis will be ... the specifically artistic meaning of a text, causing that it can perform its specifically aesthetic function' (Lotman 1972: 8). It should be emphasized that Lotman's theory of poetry is by no means limited to the study of poetic language, i.e. to analyses of the inherent structure of poetic texts, or to a search for the rules of poetic language as a set of common principles for their construction. An inquiry into what a poetic text means for a reader appears as a complex problem to Lotman, one which is submitted to historical relativism; yet, 'a discovery of the inner structure of a poem and the nature of its artistic organization' is regarded by Lotman as an 'indispensable and crucial phase of the research' (Lotman 1972: 9). Lotman, like Tynianov or Jakobson before him, is aware that artistic texts and especially poetic texts perform several other functions besides the aesthetic one and that each of these functions, like the whole semantic structure of a poem, is apt to be modified by readers as it appears against the changing historical background.

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