Quotes from 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.

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

From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.

Linguista sum, linguistici nihil a me alienum puto.

The opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy.

Ryléiev foi executado aos 31 anos. Aos 36, Bátiuchkov enlouquece. Aos 22 morre Venetínov, e aos 32 Diélvig. Aos 34, Griboiédov é assassinado, Púchkin aos 37 e Liérmontov aos 26. Suas mortes foram caracterizadas mais de uma vez como formas de suicídio. O próprio Maiakóvski comparava seu combate contra a vida cotidiana aos duelos de Púchkin e Liérmontov.

I believe that the poetic incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mis­ taken for an inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however, definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachro­nisms.

For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it.

When I speak it is in order to be heard.

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

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.

The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

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.

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning.