Roman Osipovich Jakobson (Russian, Роман Осипович Якобсон) (October 11, 1896, Moscow - July 18, 1982, Boston) was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Formalist school. He became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.
Jakobson was born in Russia to a well-to-do family of Jewish descent, and he developed a fascination with l...
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Roman Osipovich Jakobson (Russian, Роман Осипович Якобсон) (October 11, 1896, Moscow - July 18, 1982, Boston) was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Formalist school. He became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.
Jakobson was born in Russia to a well-to-do family of Jewish descent, and he developed a fascination with language at a very young age. As a student he was a leading figure of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and took part in Moscow's active world of avant-garde art and poetry. The linguistics of the time was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and insisted that the only scientific study of language was to study the history and development of words across time (the diachronic approach, in Saussure's terms). Jakobson, on the other hand, had come into contact with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and developed an approach focused on the way in which language...
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