XIII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2021

Roman Osipovich Yakobson - Russian and American linguist and literary critic, one of the largest linguists of the 20th century. He influenced the development of the human sciences not only with his innovative ideas, but also with active organizational activity. He was a member of the First Russian Avant-garde. R. Yakobson wrote works on the general theory of language, phonology, morphology, grammar, Russian language, Russian literature, poetics, Slavic studies, psycholinguistics, semiotics and many other spheres of humanitarian knowledge.

Biography

Roman Yakobson was born on October 11, 1896 in Moscow in the family of chemical engineer Joseph Yakobson and his wife Anna Volpert. As a student at Moscow University, he founded The Moscow linguistic circle. In 1918 he graduated from Moscow University. In 1920 he went to Czechoslovakia on a Red Cross mission, where he was one of the organizers of The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle. He worked in the Soviet embassy.

In January 1923, the police searched him, and in order to avoid suspicion of espionage, he left the service in the embassy, ​​but continued to collaborate with him unofficially. In 1939 he emigrated from the Czech Republic occupied by Nazi Germany to Denmark and Norway. He lectured in Copenhagen, Oslo and Uppsala; in 1941 he moved to the USA. In 1949-1967 he taught at Harvard University. Until the end of his life he worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Jacobson died in Boston on July 18, 1982.

Contribution to the linguistics

Jakobson's role in linguistics is unique. His work helped to define modern linguistics and gain its recognition as an independent science. He expanded the borders of linguistics to incorporate such areas as semantics, phonetics, poetics, language acquisition, Slavic studies, pathology, and mythology. His main contributions were to establish phonological distinctive features, to define constants and tendencies, variants and invariants, to discover unity in variety, with respect for the individual and unique in language. He was one of the founders of structuralism in linguistics and literary studies. Some of his works are of great interest to psycholinguistics.

Known as the father of modern structural linguistics, he elaborated sophisticated theories of language and communication that have had significant effects on such disciplines as anthropology, art criticism, and brain research.

The first Yakobson’s significant work was a study of the peculiarities of the language of the futurist poet Velimir Khlebnikov (1919). Jacobson proclaimed that "poetry is language in an aesthetic function", opposing poetic language to natural, and therefore "it is indifferent to the object it describes." This thesis formed the basis of the aesthetics of early Russian Formalism, which overturned the traditional relationship between form and content in a literary work. In a later article (1928), co-authored with Yu.N. Tynyanov, it is said that although literary criticism operates with its own internal laws, these laws should be correlated with other areas of culture - politics, economics, religion and philosophy.

In a study on the comparison of the Russian and Czech systems of versification (1923), Jacobson focuses on the sound segments of words, called phonemes, which do not have their own meaning, but their sequences are the most important means of expressing meanings in the language. Interest in the studying of sounds of language led Jacobson to the creation of a new branch of linguistics (with the participation of N. S. Trubetskoy) – phonology, the subject of which is the differential signs of sounds that make up phonemes. Jacobson established 12 binary acoustic features that make up phonological oppositions, which, according to him, are the linguistic universals that underlie any language.

The method of structural analysis in terms of binary oppositions has had a great influence the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss; its application by Levi-Strauss in the analysis of myth laid the foundation for French structuralism. Jacobson, along with Levi-Strauss, is the author of the idea of ​​the emergence of language as a combination of gestures and shouts, which turned into phonemes.

The foundations of another new direction in science - neurolinguistics - were laid in the work of Jakobson on aphasia (1941), in which he links speech disorders with neuroscience data on the structure of the brain. This study provided a physiological basis for his doctrine of metaphor (axis of selection) and metonymy (axis of combination), as two main opposing ways of ordering linguistic units, which also determine the difference between poetry and prose. This opposition soon became an integral part of the terminological apparatus of literary criticism.

Jakobson also interested in literary criticism. He owns a monumental study of Slavic epic poetry. Works on Russian and Czech literature show from a new angle the work of Pushkin, Pasternak, Mayakovsky and other writers, as well as such literary trends as futurism and symbolism. Many of Jacobson's recent works have been devoted to the "grammar of poetry," that is, the functioning of grammatical categories in poetry.

Numerous notes and drafts illustrate his interest in Russian literature. Much of Jakobson's work on Russian epic tradition is documented in his work on the Igor' Tale, the classic epic, the authenticity of which Jakobson demonstrated in 1948 in La Geste du Prince Igor (Scope and Contents note, Published Writings).

List of references:

JewAge. Якобсон, Роман Осипович – Биография. URL: https://u.to/BjAeGg

Rudy S. Roman Jacobson: A Chronology. Роман Якобсон: Тексты, документы, исследования. — М.: РГГУ, 1999. С. 83-103. URL: https://web.archive.org/web/20141202065120/http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc72.html#ref8425

Википедия. Якобсон, Роман Осипович. 2004 г. URL: https://u.to/W6vFGQ

Энциклопедия Кругосвет. Якобсон Роман Осипович. URL: https://www.krugosvet.ru/enc/gumanitarnye_nauki/lingvistika/YAKOBSON_ROMAN_OSIPOVICH.html