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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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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
May
Must
Differ
Convey
Languages
Essentially
Language

More quotes by 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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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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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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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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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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Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.
Roman Jakobson
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What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?
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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A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.
Roman Jakobson
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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