XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Jakobson was born in Russia on 11 October 1896[1] to a well-to-do family of Jewish descent, the industrialist Osip Jakobson and chemist Anna Volpert Jakobson, and he developed a fascination with language at a very young age. He studied at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages and then at the Historical-Philological Faculty of Moscow University. As a student he was a leading figure of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and took part in Moscow's active world of avant-garde art and poetry. The linguistics of the time was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and insisted that the only scientific study of language was to study the history and development of words across time (the diachronic approach, in Saussure's terms). Jakobson, on the other hand, had come into contact with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and developed an approach focused on the way in which language's structure served its basic function (synchronic approach) – to communicate information between speakers. Jakobson was also well known for his critique of the emergence of sound in film. Jakobson received a master's degree from Moscow University in 1918.

Although he was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, Jakobson soon became disillusioned as his early hopes for an explosion of creativity in the arts fell victim to increasing state conservatism and hostility.[5] He left Moscow for Prague in 1920, where he worked as a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission while continuing with his doctoral studies. Then, in 1933, he took up a chair at Brno. Living in Czechoslovakia meant that Jakobson was physically close to the linguist who would be his most important collaborator during the 1920s and 1930s, Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who fled Russia at the time of the Revolution and took up a chair at Vienna in 1922. In 1926 the Prague school of linguistic theory was established by the professor of English at Charles University, Vilém Mathesius, with Jakobson as a founding member and a prime intellectual force (other members included Nikolai Trubetzkoy, René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský). Jakobson immersed himself in both the academic and cultural life of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia and established close relationships with a number of Czech poets and literary figures. Jakobson received his Ph.D. from Charles University in 1930. He became a professor at Masaryk University in Brno in 1933. He also made an impression on Czech academics with his studies of Czech verse.

Jakobson escaped from Prague in early March 1939 via Berlin for Denmark, where he was associated with the Copenhagen linguistic circle, and such intellectuals as Louis Hjelmslev. He fled to Norway on 1 September 1939, and in 1940 walked across the border to Sweden, where he continued his work at the Karolinska Hospital (with works on aphasia and language competence). When Swedish colleagues feared a possible German occupation, he managed to leave on a cargo ship, together with Ernst Cassirer (the former rector of Hamburg University) to New York City in 1941 to become part of the wider community of intellectual émigrés who fled there.

In New York, he began teaching at The New School, still closely associated with the Czech émigré community during that period. At the École libre des hautes études, a sort of Francophone university-in-exile, he met and collaborated with Claude Lévi-Strauss, who would also become a key exponent of structuralism. He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and anthropologists, such as Franz Boas, Benjamin Whorf, and Leonard Bloomfield. When the American authorities considered "repatriating" him to Europe, it was Franz Boas who actually saved his life. After the war, he became a consultant to the International Auxiliary Language Association, which would present Interlingua in 1951.

In 1949 Jakobson moved to Harvard University, where he remained until his retirement in 1967. His universalizing structuralist theory of phonology, based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features, achieved its canonical exposition in a book published in the United States in 1951, jointly authored by Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle. In the same year, Jakobson's theory of 'distinctive features' made a profound impression on the thinking of a young American linguist named Noam Chomsky, in this way decisively shaping the development of linguistics for the remainder of the twentieth century.

In his last decade, Jakobson maintained an office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was an honorary Professor Emeritus. In the early 1960s Jakobson shifted his emphasis to a more comprehensive view of language and began writing about communication sciences as a whole. He converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 1975.

Jakobson died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 18 July 1982.His widow died in 1986. His first wife, who was born in 1908, died in 2000.

Roman Jakobson was a literary theorist and critic, greatly influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of structuralism and of semiology, the connection between signs as signifiers and the signified concepts. Before Saussure, linguistics was the historical ("diachronic") study of language, primarily grammars, over time. Structuralism looks to the "synchronic" study of structure alone to discover the functions of language.

Jakobson extended linguistics beyond syntax, semantics, and morphology, with a careful analysis of the sounds of language, which often convey a great deal of meaning beyond the text. He extended his new critical tools beyond his new phonology to syntax and morphology, and even semantics.

He studied communications theory (Claude Shannon), cybernetics (Norbert Wiener), and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, using them all to study poetry, music, and films (especially the emergence of sound in films).

Jakobson's influential essay on linguistics and poetics distinguished six communication functions, each associated with a dimension or factor of the communication process.

His well-known model of the functions of language can be disputed on several grounds from a theoretical standpoint. When we analyze the functions of language for a given unit (such as a word, a text or an image), we specify to which class or type it belongs (e.g., a textual or pictorial genre), which functions are present/absent, and the characteristics of the functions, including the hierarchical relations and any other relations that may operate between them.

References

"A Bibliography of the Publications of Roman Jakobson", in For Roman Jakobson. Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, 11 October 1956, The Hague: Mouton, 195.

"Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)", Sdvig Press.

"Roman Jakobson: Bibliografie", 2007. Based on Stephen Rudy's bibliography, 1990.

A Bibliography of the Publications of Roman Jakobson on Language, Literature and Culture, Harvard University Press, 1951.

A Tribute to R. Jakobson. B.; N. Y., 1983.

JAKOBSON, R., "Linguistics and Poetics", in T. Sebeok, ed., Style in Language, Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1960.

R. Jakobson. Echoes of his scholarship. Lisse, 1977.