Axes Quotes by 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…

— Roman Jakobson

It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no…

— Roman Jakobson

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

— Roman Jakobson

When I speak it is in order to be heard.

— Roman Jakobson

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.

— Roman Jakobson

The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of…

— Roman Jakobson

What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?

— Roman Jakobson

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

— Roman Jakobson

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

— Roman Jakobson

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

— Roman Jakobson

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

— Roman Jakobson

Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with…

— Roman Jakobson

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a…

— Roman Jakobson

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

— Roman Jakobson

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

— Roman Jakobson