Roman Jakobson
October 11, 1896 — July 18, 1982
Roman Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist whose wide-ranging work on phonology, literary language, child language acquisition, and the universal structures of communication made him one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century, shaping not just linguistics but also anthropology, literary theory, and the emerging field of cognitive science.
Moscow, Prague, and Exile
Born on October 11, 1896 in Moscow into a Jewish family, Jakobson showed an early obsession with language in all its forms. He was a founder of the Moscow Linguistic Circle at the age of 19 and quickly became a central figure in the Russian Formalist movement, which sought to define the specific literary qualities of literature rather than treating it as a transparent window onto history or society. In Prague in the 1920s and 1930s, he helped found the Prague Linguistic Circle, which became the pre-eminent centre of structural linguistics in the world. The Circle's work on phonology — the sound system of language — was foundational: Jakobson helped develop the concept of the phoneme as a distinctive unit and began the analysis of what he called "distinctive features," the minimal sound contrasts that languages use to distinguish meaning. When the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, he fled, eventually reaching the United States via Scandinavia.
Harvard, MIT, and the Six Functions of Language
In America, Jakobson taught at the École Libre des Hautes Études in New York, where his lectures on structural linguistics had a transformative effect on the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who applied structuralist methods to the analysis of myth, kinship, and culture — founding structural anthropology. Jakobson then joined Harvard University and later held a joint appointment at MIT, becoming one of the most intellectually famous professors in the country. Among his most influential contributions was his scheme of the six functions of language — referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual, and poetic — which provided a systematic framework for analysing what language does in different contexts. His paper "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances" (1956) proposed that all language use operates along two axes (selection and combination) and that disorders of these two functions — aphasia — map onto metaphor and metonymy, a framework with implications far beyond linguistics.
Did You Know?
Jakobson spoke more than two dozen languages and read in many more. His ability to move between Slavic languages, Germanic languages, Romance languages, and ancient languages was not merely the parlour trick it might seem: it gave him access to evidence from across the language families of the world that most linguists could not read at first hand, and it shaped his conviction that beneath the surface differences of the world's languages lay universal structural patterns that constrained what human language could be.
Legacy
Jakobson died on July 18, 1982 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 85. He remained intellectually active until the end of his life. His collected works fill eight volumes. His influence on twentieth-century thought is difficult to overstate: linguistics, literary theory, anthropology, semiotics, poetics, cognitive science, and the philosophy of language all bear his mark. He was awarded honorary doctorates from more than a dozen universities and received the Hegel Prize of Stuttgart (1977). Through his students, his books, and the sheer originality of his ideas, he remains one of the central figures of the intellectual history of the century he dominated.