Roman Jakobson

A detailed Summary of Roman Jakobson

Today I am going to talk about Roman Jakobson. First of all I would like to tell you the most important facts of his life.

Roman Jakobson was born in Moscow in 1896. He grew up in pre-Revolutionary Russia and began his high school studies at the Lazarev Institute of Languages at the age of ten. He taught at the university of Moscow and it was there that he and six other students founded the Moscow Linguistics Circle. In 1920 he left the Soviet Union for Prague where he worked as a translator and helped to form the Prague Linguistics Circle in 1926. Jakobson was known for his anti-fascist feelings and with the fascist invasion he fled to Denmark and finally in 1941 to America where he lived until his death in 1982. He was professor at the Columbia University in Harvard and at the MIT.

His teaching deeply influenced several trends in the evolution of 20th century structuralism and linguistics.

Four epochs in the development of Jakobsonīs research can be distinguished.

1) In his formalist period from 1914 to 1920 he was both the founder of the Moscow Linguistics Circle and a member of the influential Opoyaz poetics group.

2) In his structuralist period from 1920 to 1939 he was a dominating figure of the P

Information and communication theory, mathematics, neurolinguistics, biology and even physics were among the fields to which Jakobson extended his interests.

If the communication is orientated towards the addresser of the message the Emotive function dominates. The message here would be a sentence like "London is far away from home." Which aims to express the addressers feeling and his emotional response to a particular situation.

aphasic language - which enables us to throw light on the selection of phonemes the distinctive features and their mutual relations and to get closer to the main principles of this selection and of this interdependence so as to be in a position to establish and explain the universal laws which underlie the phonological structure of the world's languages."

The central fields of his research were poetics and linguistics, especially phonology, morphology, dialectology and aphasiology. From his early years his interest went beyond language and the verbal arts to cover the larger semiotic fields of culture and aesthetics. Jakobson contributed to applied semiotics with papers on music, painting, film, theatre and to fundamental issues of semiotics such as the concept of the sign, system, code, structure, function, communication and the history of semiotics. Moreover he was one of the first scholars to discover the relevance of Pierceīs semiotics to linguistics.

1) Study in communication of verbal messages LINGUISTICS

J. is of the opinion that language must be investigated in all variety of its function. Therefore he developed this model.

If the communication is orientated towards the addressee the Conative function dominates. It could also be called vocative or imperative function and is indicated by devices such as "Look!" or "Listen!".

Whereas Saussure was of the opinion that the study of the structural relations within and between languages as they exist at any given time (synchronistic studies) and the study of changes in sounds and their relations over time (diachronic studies) are completely separate and exclusive.

These are only indirectly related to language.

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Approximate Word count = 1526
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: History