Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist who shaped structural linguistics, phonology, and the study of language functions.

Structuralism: An approach that explains cultural and linguistic phenomena through relationships within organized systems. Jakobson treated language as a system whose elements gain value through their relations.
Distinctive Feature: A phonetic property that distinguishes phonemes within a language. Jakobson analyzed phonological contrasts as combinations of features such as voicing and nasality.
Claude Lévi-Strauss: A French anthropologist who applied structural analysis to kinship, myth, and culture. His encounter with Jakobson helped carry structural linguistics into anthropology.
Russian Formalism: A literary movement that studied the devices and structures distinguishing literary language. Jakobson’s early literary criticism helped shape this movement’s account of poetic form.
Structural Anthropology: An approach to anthropology that analyzes cultural systems through underlying relations and structures. Jakobson’s linguistic methods influenced Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of kinship and myth.
Prague Linguistic Circle: A group of linguists and literary scholars founded in Prague in 1926. Jakobson helped establish this group, where functional structural linguistics took shape.
Markedness: An asymmetry in which one form is treated as less basic or more restricted than another. Jakobson used marked–unmarked oppositions to describe patterns in sound systems and language acquisition.
Viktor Shklovsky: A Russian literary theorist associated with Russian Formalism and the concept of defamiliarization. Jakobson’s early work developed amid the literary debates of Russian Formalism.
Poetics: The study of how literary works are made and how their forms produce effects. Jakobson’s linguistic account of the poetic function became a framework for poetics.
Structuralist Literary Criticism: The analysis of literature through systems of signs, conventions, and formal relations. Jakobson’s theories of poetic language supplied structuralist critics with linguistic tools.

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