Roman Jackobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson is a scholar of Russian origin; he took his first degree, in Oriental languages, at Moscow University.

As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century.
Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology.

He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language).

Jakobson is a phonological Tory. For him, only a small group of phonetic parameters are intrinsically fit to play a linguistically distinctive role.

Functions of Language