XIII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2021

Intoduction

Roman Osipovich Jakobson is a Russian and American linguist and literary critic. He is one of the founders of the Moscow, Prague, and New York linguistic groups, one of the founders of structuralism in linguistics and literary studies. He was engaged in research in the field of general linguistics, slavic languages, poetics. Also, he is one of the greatest linguists of the XX century, who influenced the development of the humanities not only with his innovative ideas, but with his organizational activity. He is a member of the first Russian avant-garde.

Since childhood, Roman Osipovich was fluent in French. When he studied at the gymnasium at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental languages, he began to collect Moscow city folklore. It led him to investigate the problem of the connection of sound and meaning, which occupied him all his life.

Scientific activity

The central theme of Jacobson's scientific search was to establish the relationship between sound and meaning in language. He gave a course of lectures about it, published in the book "Six lectures on sound and meaning "(1976), around this problem he often built his analysis of the poetics of literary works. In contrast to classical phonetics, which studied sounds by themselves, Jacobson studied them from the point of view of semantic functions in language. The structural analysis applied by Jacobson reduced the phoneme to a set of sense-distinguishing features, and arranged the features themselves into binary oppositions ("Phonological studies" 1962, 1971). The theory, which he founded, was confirmed in the conclusions of the electro-acoustical and neurophysiological studies. Jacobson's phonological studies have had a significant impact on Ethnology and ethnolinguistics. In 1952, a joint congress of linguists and ethnologists was held, the results of which were summed up by Jacobson and Levi-Strauss. Later, the scientist applied dichotomous oppositions in studies of grammar and typology of languages. Jacobson insisted on using the methods of describing structures developed in mathematics in linguistics. He applied this approach to the analysis of grammatical categories of the verb, which allowed him to create an initial version of the generative grammar. The linguist's attention to the historical development of language distinguished him from the structuralists who were close to him in their views. They were De Saussure and Chomsky. He saw diachrony not as isolated changes, but as systemic shifts. Typological linguistics began to deal with similarities between geographically close languages, regardless of their genealogical relationships. This area includes a number of works by Jacobson on language unions. Along with linguistic research itself, Jacobson dealt with problems that are borderline for a number of disciplines (linguistics and psychiatry, linguistics and philosophy), applying the methods and achievements of the exact sciences.

Conclusion

Jacobson is the preeminent linguist of our century. He was a man of comprehensive education, distinguished by a wide range of scientific interests, one of the main theorists of structural linguistics and poetics, an outstanding slavist, typologist, and he was fond of psycholinguistics and experimental phonetics.

References:

1. Иванов В. В. Лингвистический путь Романа Якобсона // Якобсон Р. О. Избранные работы. М., 1985. С. 5-29.

2. Иванов В. В. Поэтика Якобсона // Якобсон Р. О. Работы по поэтике. М., 1987. С. 5-22.

3. http://philologos.narod.ru/classics/jakobson-lp.htm

4. https://studfiles.net.