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Roman Jakobson (1896–1982)

Jakobson was among the most wide-ranging linguists of the century — a founder of two schools of structural thought, the author of the standard model of the functions of language, and almost the only structuralist to read Peirce seriously and so to build a bridge between the two great traditions of the sign.

Roman Jakobson (1896–1982), Russian-American linguist and literary theorist, born in Moscow. A founder of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and then, in exile, of the Prague Linguistic Circle, he carried the Prague School’s structural phonology across Europe ahead of the war and on to the United States, where he taught at Columbia, Harvard, and MIT. His reach ran from the sound-structure of language through poetics, aphasia, and the study of myth with Lévi-Strauss.

Key concepts

The six functions of language. In “Linguistics and Poetics” (1960) Jakobson argued that every act of verbal communication involves six factors — addresser, addressee, context, message, contact, code — and that each throws weight on a corresponding function: the emotive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalingual. Any utterance mixes them; which dominates is what gives the utterance its character.

The poetic function. When language draws attention to its own form — to the shape, sound, and patterning of the message itself — the poetic function is in command. Jakobson defined it precisely: “the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination.” Poetry is what happens when the choices that would normally pass unnoticed are made to echo and rhyme along the line.

Metaphor and metonymy. Jakobson distinguished two axes of language — similarity (selection, substitution) and contiguity (combination, sequence) — and tied them to metaphor and metonymy respectively. He grounded the pair empirically in two types of aphasia, in which one or the other capacity fails, and extended it into a general principle for reading styles, genres, and whole symbolic systems.

The bridge to Peirce. Almost alone among the structuralists, Jakobson took Peirce seriously, adopting the triad of icon, index, and symbol into a tradition otherwise built on Saussure. It was the first significant connection between the two founding lineages of the sign — the dyadic, system-bound sign and the triadic, world-spanning one.

Where Jakobson stops

Jakobson’s gift was for structure — for finding the small set of contrasts and axes underlying an apparently endless variety of speech, verse, and sign. His model of the functions is among the most durable tools in the study of language precisely because it is a grid: clean, general, and applicable anywhere. That is also its boundary. The scheme tells you which function dominates an utterance but not what the utterance means in its moment, and the poetic function, defined as the message turning on its own form, names where literary effect lives without quite saying why a given form moves a given reader. Jakobson built the bridge to Peirce but did not cross all the way over: he borrowed the triadic sign as a useful classification rather than taking on the process-metaphysics — the endless onward life of the interpretant — that made it more than a typology. He mapped the system of meaning with unmatched economy, and left the living event of meaning to others.

Key works

See also: Semiotics · Structuralism · Saussure · Peirce · Lévi-Strauss