Jakobson, Roman
Jakobson, Roman, b 11 October 1896 in Moscow, d 18 July 1982 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. American linguist and philologist of Jewish-Russian descent. He studied at Moscow University, and received his doctorate from Prague University. He was a professor at several universities: Brno (1933–9), Columbia (1943–9), Harvard (from 1949), and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1957). Along with Vilém Mathesius and Nikolai Trubetzkoy he founded the so-called Prague school of linguistics, which developed the phonemic principle in both synchronic and historical linguistics, and the concept of linguistic leagues, ie, similarities in the development of adjacent languages independently of the irgenetic interrelations. During his stay in the United States of America Jakobson revised the notion of phoneme, defining it as a bundle of distinctive features, 12 in number, that are common to all languages of the world. The search for universals, often at the cost of ignoring the peculiarities of individual languages, is typical of his conceptual approach. In this spirit he also attempted to build a theory of a Slavic conjugation based on a single stem, to develop a general case theory, and to derive Slavic versification systems from a common source. In this approach factual evidence was often sacrificed to theoretic consistency. Accordingly, in his Remarques sur l’évolution phonologique du russe comparée à celle des autres langues slaves (1929) only the phonological development of Russian and Serbo-Croatian is held to be motivated, while the rest of the Slavic languages, including the Ukrainian language, appear to be devoid of independent development, but determined by either Russian or Serbo-Croatian tendencies. Transferred to the political sphere, this attitude resulted in an attack on the policy of Ukrainization and on its promoters (1934). Similarly, Jakobson’s article on the imperative in Ukrainian (1965) is an attempt to play down the peculiarities of this form. In 1952–4 Jakobson argued against André Mazon for the authenticity of Slovo o polku Ihorevi.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Roman Jakobson: A Bibliography (The Hague 1971)
Holenstein, E. Roman Jakobson’s Approach to Language: Phenomenological Structuralism (Bloomington, Ind 1976)
George Yurii Shevelov
[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]