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

Roman Jakobson

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Roman Jakobson
Age: 85 †
Born: 1896
Born: September 28
Died: 1982
Died: July 18
Critic
Historian
Linguist
Literary Scholar
Pedagogue
Teacher
Writer
Moscow
Russian SFSR
Roman Jakobsson
Except
Speech
Understood
Delimited
Sound
Classified
Language
Explained
Cannot
Perform
Light
Sounds
Tasks

More quotes by Roman Jakobson

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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.
Roman Jakobson
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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.
Roman Jakobson
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A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.
Roman Jakobson
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When I speak it is in order to be heard.
Roman Jakobson
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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.
Roman Jakobson
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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.
Roman Jakobson
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Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.
Roman Jakobson
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Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.
Roman Jakobson
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Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.
Roman Jakobson
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What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?
Roman Jakobson
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A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.
Roman Jakobson