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Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) was a Russian linguist who was one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century. He was a member of the Russian Formalist school and later taught and helped bridge European and American linguistics between the two World Wars. Jakobson developed an important model of the six functions of language that distinguishes the necessary elements of communication and influenced many fields including linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, and literary studies.

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244 views5 pages

Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) was a Russian linguist who was one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century. He was a member of the Russian Formalist school and later taught and helped bridge European and American linguistics between the two World Wars. Jakobson developed an important model of the six functions of language that distinguishes the necessary elements of communication and influenced many fields including linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, and literary studies.

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Who is

Roman
Jakobson?
Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) was
one of the greatest linguists of the
20th century. He was born in Russia on
October 11, 1896 and died on July
18, 1982. He was a member of the
Russian Formalist school as early as
1915. Jakobson taught in
Czechoslovakia between the two
world wars, where, along with Nikolai
Trubetzkoy, he was one of the
leaders of the influential Prague
Linguistic Circle. When
Czechoslovakia was invaded by the
Nazis, he was forced to flee to
Scandinavia, and went from there to
the United States in 1941. From 1942
to 1946 Jakobson taught at the École
Libre des Hautes Études in New York
City, where he collaborated with
Claude Lévi-Strauss.
In 1943 he became one of the
founding members of the Linguistic
Circle of New York and acted as its
vice president until 1949. He taught
at numerous institutions from 1943 ,
including Harvard University and
MIT. Through his teaching in the
United States, Jakobson helped to
bridge the gap between European
and American linguistics. He had a
profound influence on general
linguistics (especially on Noam
Chomsky's and Morris Halle's work)
and on Slavic studies, but also on
semiotics, anthropology,
psychoanalysis, ethnology,
mythology, communication theory
and literary studies. His famous
model of the functions of
language is part of the intellectual
heritage of semiotics.
Jakobson's model of the functions of language distinguishes six
elements, or factors of communication, that are necessary for
communication to occur: (1) context, (2) addresser (sender), (3)
addressee (receiver), (4) contact, (5) common code and (6)
message. Each factor is the focal point of a relation, or function, that
operates between the message and the factor. The functions are the
following, in order: (1) referential ("The Earth is round"), (2) emotive
("Yuck!"), (3) conative ("Come here"), (4) phatic ("Hello?"), (5)
metalingual ("What do you mean by 'krill'?"), and (6) poetic ("Smurf").
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 these functions, including
the hierarchical relations and any other relations that may operate
between them.

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