Roman Jakobson

Russian-born American linguist and literary theorist

• Born: October 11, 1896
• Birthplace: Moscow, Russia
• Died: July 18, 1982
• Place of death: Cambridge, Massachusetts

A prominent and founding member of the linguistic circles of Moscow and Prague, Jakobson was instrumental in the European development of structuralism in linguistics and in literary theory. Arriving in the United States in 1941, he brought extensive knowledge of European linguistics the science of human language to the American scene, and, through his teaching at Columbia and Harvard and through his prolific scholarship, he profoundly influenced Slavic studies, poetic analysis, and the development of American phonology.

Early Life

Born to Anna Volpert Jakobson and the chemist Osip Jakobson in 1896, Roman Jakobson (roh-MAHN YAHK-ohb-sehn) grew up in the intellectual circles of Moscow, where French and Russian were the normal languages of the intelligentsia and conversation often focused on poetry and art. By the time he entered high school at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow in 1906-1907, he was already engaged in writing and analyzing poetry. The curriculum at the institute included studies of Russian folk poetry and folklore, as well as literary theory, French poetry, and Russian grammar.

Jakobson’s friends were the young painters and poets of Moscow, and he saw in the emerging Russian Futurist poetry relationships to French post-Impressionism and cubism. Jakobson exchanged writing and ideas with the poets Velemir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchonykh, and the latter eventually published three experimental “supraconscious” poems that Jakobson wrote in 1914 under the pseudonym Alyagrov.

Entering the University of Moscow in 1914, Jakobson was enrolled in the Department of Slavic and Russian of the Historico-Philological Faculty, where linguistics was a required subject. His earliest readings in linguistics were a recent study of Russian vowels by Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba, a book not approved by his teachers because of its departure from traditional Russian linguistics, and a forgotten work on sound alternations from 1881 by the Polish linguist Mikołaj Kruszewski. Although dissatisfied with the orthodoxy of the Moscow linguistic school, Jakobson was very much interested in his studies of Old Russian language and literature, particularly in folk poetry. In 1914, with six other students from the faculty, he drafted the statutes of the Moscow Linguistic Circle; young Moscow linguists began meeting in spring 1915, combining insights from linguistics, poetics, and metrics for the analysis and discussion of the verse of Russian folk epics (byliny in Russian).

The Moscow Linguistic Circle remained Jakobson’s intellectual home until he left for Prague in 1920. At meetings of the circle, he tested his analysis of Khlebnikov’s verse, and that analysis in turn was the beginning of his lifelong work on phonology, the structure of sounds in human language. A draft of his first book, Noveshaya russkaya poeziya (1921; recent Russian poetry), a slim volume of sixty-eight pages published in Prague, was read in 1919 at the Moscow Linguistic Circle.

Life’s Work

Linguistics, the science of human language, is at the core of Jakobson’s life work. His most significant contributions to the discipline involved phonology, but he was far from a narrow specialist. In fact, perhaps more than any other linguist of the twentieth century, Jakobson brought to the field a wide range of perspectives, from poetry and folk literature to acoustic science, medicine, and child language acquisition. He also extended linguistics into other fields Slavic history and culture, literary criticism, and semiotics. Many of these interests were already present in his Moscow years, but others evolved during his two decades in Czechoslovakia (1920-1939), two years in Scandinavia (1939-1941), and finally throughout his forty years of teaching and research in the United States (1941-1982).

Heading for Prague in 1920, on a boat between Tallin and Stetin, Jakobson passed the time reading Czech poetry. Intrigued by elements that he encountered in the verse, he decided to conduct a study comparing Czech and Russian verse from the medieval period to the avant-garde. What he sought was a universal theory of metrics, applicable to all human languages. Jakobson came to view metrics not only in the traditional terms of stress, length, and syllable but also in terms of the phonetic properties of consonants and vowels and the presence and absence of the boundaries between words. Indeed, his studies of poetry expanded over the years to grammatical, as well as metrical, analysis, and by the end of his career he had published essays on poetic texts from more than a dozen languages with poetic traditions spanning a thousand years. Jakobson brought linguistic analysis to poetry and poetry to linguistic analysis.

Complementing Jakobson’s interests in poetry was his continuing study of both modern and ancient sound systems and how they are structured. From work on the phonology of Czech and Russian, conducted in Prague during the 1920’s, Jakobson developed in the 1930’s a theory that phonemes (the sounds of a language) are not unanalyzable entities, but rather are composed of features, each of which might serve to distinguish one phoneme from another. As in poetry, here, too, Jakobson sought a universal framework that could be applied to all languages. Much of this work was carried out in Prague with his friend and fellow Russian expatriate Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy, but it was Jakobson who established that the distinctive features of languages are binary; each exists as a two-way opposition (for example, English b is distinct from p by the opposition voiced/voiceless, whereas b is distinct from m by the opposition oral/nasal). Almost twenty-five years later in his career, as Cross Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University (a position he held from 1949 until his retirement in 1967), Jakobson worked with two colleagues, Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle, to determine the acoustic and articulatory bases of the distinctive features. Their landmark book Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates (1952) established the foundation for the development of generative phonology in the United States.

Jakobson’s early work on distinctive features was interrupted by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, he fled north, first to Denmark, then to Norway, and finally to Sweden, where in Stockholm he turned to yet another aspect of phonological study. With access to the medical libraries of the Swedish capital, Jakobson established what he termed a “mirror-image relationship” between the acquisition order of distinctive oppositions in sounds by children and the loss of those oppositions in victims of aphasia. He pointed out important relationships between these orders and the types of historical changes that had been observed in the sound systems of a number of different languages. Kindersprache, Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (1941; Child Language, Aphasia, and Phonological Universals , 1968) was a pioneering work, and although details of Jakobson’s findings have been challenged, the book is a classic in both aphasia studies and child language acquisition.

Jakobson arrived in New York in June, 1941. Although he had held a professional position in Russian philology at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and served as a visiting lecturer in Russian and linguistics at universities in Copenhagen, Oslo, and Uppsala, it was not until the fall of 1946 that he received a regular appointment at an American university professor of Czechoslovak studies at Columbia University. In the interim, Jakobson taught, primarily in French, at the École Libre des Hautes Études, a university-in-exile established in 1942 at the New School for Social Research in New York City by Belgian and French scholars who had fled the war in Europe.

At the École Libre des Hautes Études, Jakobson’s first lectures were on the relationship between phonology and semantics (meaning), and he framed much of the discussion in terms of his agreements and disagreements with the theories of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Jakobson brought to the United States the broad scope of European linguistics at a time when American linguistics was becoming increasingly isolated, narrow, and behavioristic. As a champion of flexibility and with a philosophical concern for explanation and universals in the study of language, Jakobson was at odds with much of what his American contemporaries of the 1940’s viewed as the proper scope of the discipline. His dynamic personality, his excellence as a teacher, and his prolific publications influenced several generations of students, and in 1956, only fifteen years after his arrival and four years after his naturalization as a U.S. citizen, Jakobson was elected president of the Linguistic Society of America.

Still at the École Libre des Hautes Études, Jakobson worked with Byzantine scholar Henri Grégoire on the authenticity of the Slovo o polku Igoreve (The Lay of Igor’s Host), a medieval Russian epic. When Jakobson joined the faculty of Harvard in 1949, he continued his lectures on the Russian language and on Slavic mythology and folklore. His influence on Slavic studies in the United States is unparalleled.

In 1957, Jakobson was appointed visiting institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), concurrently with his Harvard appointment in Slavic studies. By 1960, his Harvard professorship had been extended to general linguistics, and the MIT appointment had become permanent; he continued his active MIT affiliation until 1970. This period coincides in the United States with the development and dominance of generative grammar, a theory Jakobson never adopted. His influence on American linguistics declined, and, during the last quarter century of his life, Jakobson focused increasingly on poetics and semiotics; he became widely viewed as a founder of structuralism in literary theory.

Significance

Jakobson’s influence on twentieth century linguistics and literary studies comes from the energetic force of his personality as much as from his scholarship; He was one of the most prolific scholars of his time. His Selected Writings (1962-1985) initially constituted seven volumes, most more than seven hundred pages in length. However, he produced not a single major book-length study, and some of his work has been described as “dilettantish.” Many of his most effective publications were produced in collaboration with other scholars: the work on the The Lay of Igor’s Host with Grégoire; a major analysis of the poem “Les Chats” by Charles Baudelaire coauthored with the structural anthropologistClaude Lévi-Strauss, published in 1962 in L’Homme; the acoustic and articulatory bases of distinctive features with Fant and Halle; and, with his wife of twenty years, Krystyna Pomorska, a professor of Slavic studies at MIT, Dialogues (1983).

A major catalyst in the establishment of important organizations of linguists, Jakobson was a cofounder of the Moscow Linguistic Circle, serving as president until his departure for Prague in 1920. As the first vice president of the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926, he played a major role in the Prague school until he left Czechoslovakia in 1939. In New York, too, he was a charter member of the Linguistic Circle, vice president from its founding in 1943 until he went to Harvard in 1949.

Jakobson lectured throughout the world, reaching an unusually wide audience through visiting professorships and participation at national and international conferences; he received honorary degrees from more than two dozen universities in the United States, Great Britain, and Europe. His international reputation and influence were surely related to his fluent speaking knowledge of six languages and his ability to read twenty-five.

Bibliography

Armstrong, Daniel, and C. H. van Schooneveld, eds. Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship. Lisse, the Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1977. An excellent and extensive overview of Jakobson’s contributions to numerous fields of study. Of particular interest are essays by Umberto Eco on semiotics, Morris Halle on phonology, A. R. Luria on aphasia, and Krystyna Pomorska on the new poetics.

Hanson, Paul, ed. Twentieth Century European Cultural Theorists. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Group, 2001. Examines the ideas of Jakobson and other cultural theorists.

Holenstein, Elmar. Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language: Phenomenological Structuralism. Translated by Catherine Schelbert and Tarcisius Schelbert. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. An account of the philosophical and methodological principles of Jakobson’s work and the tenets of his comprehensive theory of language. Includes a brief historical introduction, an accurate biographical outline, and a selected bibliography through 1975.

Jakobson, Roman, and Krystyna Pomorska. Dialogues. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983. The record of a remarkable dialogue on Jakobson’s thought and work. First published in French, this book is highly autobiographical and provides particularly good insights into Jakobson’s intellectual life.

Pomorska, Krystyna, et al., eds. Language, Poetry, and Poetics: The Generation of the 1890s Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Majakovskij. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1987. Especially valuable for the essays on Jakobson’s work with Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky; his philosophical base drawn from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl, and Charles Sanders Peirce; his cooperative work on phonology with Nikolai Trubetzkoy; and Pomorska’s discussion of Jakobson’s attitudes toward his own life, “The Autobiography of a Scholar.”

Waugh, Linda R. Roman Jakobson’s Science of Language. Lisse, the Netherlands: Peter de Ridder Press, 1976. Waugh worked closely with Jakobson during the last decade of his life, coauthoring his final monograph on phonology, The Sound Shape of Language (1979). Here she delineates the invariant organizing principles of language that Jakobson developed over his lifetime.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Semiotics and Language: The Work of Roman Jakobson.” In Hi-Fives: A Trip to Semiotics, edited by Roberta Kevelson. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Examines Jakobson’s ideas on the workings of semiotics and language.