Biography

(r män´ yäk´ôbs n) (KEY) , 1896–1982, Russian-American linguist and literary critic, b. Moscow. His early work was grounded in structural linguistics and stressed that the aim of historical linguistics is the study not of isolated changes within a language but of systematic change. As a professor of Russian in Moscow in the 1920s, Jakobson and a few colleagues, most notably N. S. Trubetskoi, developed what came to be known as the Prague school of linguistics. They argued that synchronic phonology, the study of speech sounds in a language at a given time, should be considered in light of diachronic phonology, the study of speech sounds as they have changed over the course of the language’s history. After teaching briefly in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s, Jakobson went on to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden before coming to the United States to teach at Columbia Univ. (1943–49) and later Harvard (1949–67); at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1957–67) he worked with Morris Halle on distinctive-feature theory, developing a binary system that defines a speech sound by the presence or absence of specific phonetic qualities, such as stridency and nasality.
See his Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1978); Framework of Language (1980).

Not available

Not available

Not available

Not available

Not available