On Language - Hardcover

Jakobson, Roman

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674635353 ISBN 13: 9780674635357

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 1990

Synopsis

One measure of Roman Jakobson's towering role in linguistics is that his work has defined the field itself. Jakobson's contributions have now become a permanent part of American and European views on language. With his uncanny ability to survive devastating uprooting again and again--from Moscow to Prague to Upsalla to New York and finally to Cambridge--Jakobson was able to bring to each milieu new and stimulating ideas, which have broadened the perspective of linguistics while giving it new direction and specifying its domain. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston have assembled an intellectual overview of his work in linguistics from partial and complete works that they have arranged, introduced, and cross-referenced. Some appear here in print for the first time, others are newly translated into English. More than a convenient access to Jakobson's basic works, On Language presents a broad profile of the polymathic general linguist who suggested radical innovations in every area of linguistic theory.

The breadth of Jakobson's engagement in linguistics is captured by the editors' informative introduction and by their perspicacious presentation of topics. His general view of the science of linguistics is followed by his stunning contributions to linguistic metatheory in the areas of structure and function. Various aspects of historical, typological, and sociolinguistics are also explored along with his phonological theory--perhaps his most influential contribution--and his views on grammatical semantics. A topic that increasingly preoccupied Jakobson in his later career, the interrelationship between sound and meaning, is presented here in detail. The concluding three essays focus on the various relations between linguistics and the human and natural sciences, which led Jakobson ultimately to be characterized as an interdisciplinary thinker.

About this title

About the Author:

Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) was at the time of his death Professor Emeritus at Harvard University and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Review:

An accessible collection of theoretical works by one of the most important and versatile linguists of the century...The works collected in this volume...speak eloquently. (Olga T. Yokoyama Russian Review)

Roman Jakobson has given us a marvelous gift: he has given linguistics to artists. It is he who opened up the live and sensitive juncture between one of the most exact of the sciences of man and the creative world. He represents, both for his theoretical thought and for his actual accomplishments, the meeting, of scientific thought and the creative spirit. (Roland Barthes)

An anthology which unquestionably offers the best of Jakobson...even a brief perusal of the volume under review should persuade anyone that in terns I of trenchancy, precision, versatility and cultural range, Jakobson's oeuvre is without rival in the modern age. He has been the central, if as yet unacknowledged. figure in the development of modern poetics; it is time for us to come to terms with his formidable legacy. (F. W. Galan Times Literary Supplement)

Part of the fascination of Language in Literature is that it shows Jakobson returning again and again to the same topics, and sometimes even to the same texts, over a period of sixty years, and placing them in ever larger contexts...Jakobson's youthful ties to the Russian Futurists, and particularly to Velimir Khlebnikov, surely helped to strengthen his conviction that the critic's role is to formulate explicitly, and to demonstrate by means of a rigorous analysis the truths that the poet discovers intuitively. (Thomas R. Hart Comparative Literature)

Twenty-nine articles in all, written over a period of sixty years, although the represent only a fraction of Jakobson's output, provide scarcely-needed con firmation of the extraordinary and sustained depth and breadth of his erudition and interests. (David Shepherd Modern Language Review)

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0674635353
• ISBN 13: 9780674635357
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 672
• Editor: Waugh Linda, Monville-Burston Monique