Roman Jakobson Quotes

22 quotes in 334 categories

• What's next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?
• Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.
• 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…
• 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.
• Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.
• A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.
• 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…
• Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic.
• 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…
• At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.
• Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.
• Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.
• Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.
• 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…
• 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…
• When I speak it is in order to be heard.
• A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.
• From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.
• Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.
• 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…

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