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Roman Jakobson

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Roman Osipovich Jakobson (born Roman Iosel-Berovich Yakobson; 10 October [O.S. 28 September] 1896 – 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology. Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax, morphology and semantics. He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce's semiotics, as well as from communication theory and cybernetics, he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music, and the visual arts including cinema.

Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, among others, Jakobson became a pivotal figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy, anthropology and literary theory; his development of the approach pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure, known as "structuralism", became a major post-war intellectual movement in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, though the influence of structuralism declined during the 1970s, Jakobson's work has continued to receive attention in linguistic anthropology, especially through the ethnography of communication developed by Dell Hymes and the semiotics of culture developed by Jakobson's former student Michael Silverstein. Jakobson's concept of underlying linguistic universals, particularly his celebrated theory of distinctive features, decisively influenced the early thinking of Noam Chomsky, who became the dominant figure in theoretical linguistics during the second half of the twentieth century.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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The former pointed out that a great many purely psychiatric cases can be explained by the same psychoanalytic process as those used in dreams and in the neuroses (Freudsche Mechanismen). Jung employed with success the analytic method of interpretation in the strangest and most obscure phenomena of dementia præcox, the origin of which appeared quite clear when correlated with the life and interests of the patient…
Sigmund Freud, The history of the psychoanalytic movement
Close in meaning to Roman Jakobson; the term itself is not named.
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Much, for instance, is to be learnt by a careful study of language by those who combine sound linguistic knowledge with psychological training. It is in language, spoken and written, that we find at once the great instrument and the great document of the distinctively human progress from a mere _Psyche_ to a mature _Nous_, from Soul to Mind. Whether we look at the varieties of its structure under different…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind
Close in meaning to Roman Jakobson; the term itself is not named.
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This discovery was very far from being a disappointment. It was in complete harmony with another one: that the depth psychology revealed by psychoanalysis was in fact the psychology of the normal mind. Our path had been like that of chemistry: the great qualitative differences between substances were traced back to quantitative variations in the proportions in which the same elements were combined.
Sigmund Freud, The problem of lay-analyses
Close in meaning to Roman Jakobson; the term itself is not named.
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Roman Jakobson

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