Roman Jakobson quotes

Roman Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist who made pioneering contributions to structural linguistics and semiotics. His research shaped the development of modern language theory, poetics, and communication studies. He influenced generations of scholars through his groundbreaking work on language structure and function. Here are 13 of his quotes:

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.

Roman Jakobson

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

Roman Jakobson

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

Roman Jakobson

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

Roman Jakobson

Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx.

Roman Jakobson

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.

Roman Jakobson

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

Roman Jakobson

It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification.

Roman Jakobson

Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve.

Roman Jakobson

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

Roman Jakobson

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.

Roman Jakobson