Year: 1983
Type: article
Abstract: JAKOBSONRoman Jakobson, a towering figure of linguistic science for most of the 20th century, died on July 18, 1982 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 85.Although primarily a linguist, Jakobson was a scholar of great versatility and scope, as shown both by his publications and by the students he trained.In the latest edition of Who's who, Jakobson is identified as a linguist and a literary historian, a characterization which (one may assume) he himself considered an adequate shorthand designation of his multiple activities.And, indeed, Jakobson was also a pioneer and a moving force in the theory of versification, in analysis of poetic form and poetic language, and in semiotic theory.But his interests and publications extended even beyond this, to cultural history, anthropology, neurology, and information theory-so much so that one of his biographers labeled him a 'polyhistor' (van Schooneveld 1977:1).Among all these interests, however, language and its structure were always the basic landmarks of Jakobson's intellectual landscape.His adopted coat of arms summed it up succinctly: Linguista sum: linguistici nihil a me alienum puto.It would be difficult indeed to do justice to Jakobson's multiple achievements in a single tribute.In this journal, clearly, the focus must be on Jakobson's life and work as a linguist.In concentrating on this aspect of his rich life, I do so with confidence that others in other places will highlight Jakobson's additional accomplishments, primarily the significance of his poetic and literary contributions.Roman Jakobson was born in Moscow on October 11, 1896, a son of a prominent industrialist and chemical engineer, Osip, and his wife, Anna, nee Volpert.Young Roman's intellectual promise and inclinations were evident from his early years.Poetry was, in his own words, his first passion during his lyceum years, where his interests were fostered by a series of excellent teachers; and it was poetry, and the bold linguistic experiments of such Russian poets as Majakovskij and Xlebnikov, that aroused the young Jakobson's intense interest in language and in the role of phonological elements in poetic structures.In 1914, he received his A.B. degree from the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages, with a silver medal; and after studying linguistics, literary history, and folklore at Moscow University (1914-18), he was awarded the Buslaev prize for his study of the language of the North Russian oral epos (1914).Jakobson received his M.A. from Moscow University in 1918, and became a research associate for Russian language and literature at the University.But even prior to that he was an instrumental force in the foundation of the Moskovskij Lingvisticeskij Kruzok (Moscow Linguistic Circle), of which he served as President from 1915 to 1920, and in the development of the Leningrad-based OPOJAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language.The experiences and interests of these early years of his career and the influence of Russian formalist thought, in the development of which Jakobson participated so actively in his youth, marked much of his subsequent scholarly activity.The linguistic ideas which influenced him during these early years were primarily the phonological
Source: Language
Author: Henry Kučera
Institution: Brown University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7136128438