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71-573: A pioneer of structural linguistics , Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzkoy , he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology . Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language such as syntax , morphology and semantics . He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics , most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of

142-523: A Russophile, in his "Remarques sur l'évolution phonologique du russe comparée a celle des autres langues slaves" ("Remarks on the phonological evolution of the Russian language in comparison with other Slavic languages", 1929) and similarly in "Slavische Sprachfragen in der Sovjetunion" ("Slavic Language Questions in the Soviet Union", 1934, an attack on the policy of Ukrainization and its proponents) he presented

213-573: A book published in the United States in 1951, jointly authored by Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle . In the same year, Jakobson's theory of 'distinctive features' made a profound impression on the thinking of young Noam Chomsky, in this way also influencing generative linguistics. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1960. In his last decade, Jakobson maintained an office at

284-478: A continuation in a humanistic tradition which considers language as a human invention. A similar idea is found in Port-Royal Grammar : Another way to approach structural explanation is from Saussure's concept of semiology ( semiotics ). Language is considered as arising from the interaction of form and meaning. Saussure's concept of the bilateral sign (signifier – signified) entails that the conceptual system

355-444: A language are explained in relation to each other. For example, to understand the function of one grammatical case, it must be contrasted to all the other cases and, more widely, to all other grammatical categories of the language. The structural approach in humanities follows from 19th century Geist thinking which is derived from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 's philosophy. According to such theories, society or language arises as

426-489: A major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or English Firthian – later Hallidean – linguistics). The American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962 paper, "The Ethnography of Speaking," as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to American linguistic anthropology. The Prague structuralists also had a significant influence on structuralist film theory , especially through

497-401: A modification of August Schleicher 's Darwinian organic analogy in linguistics; his concept of la langue is the social organism or spirit . It needs to be noted that, despite certain similarities, structuralism and functionalism in humanistic linguistics are explicitly anti-Darwinian. This means that linguistic structures are not explained in terms of selection through competition; and that

568-419: A parallel between social structures and the organs of an organism which have different functions or purposes. Similar analogies and metaphors were used in the historical-comparative linguistics that Saussure was part of. Saussure himself made a modification of August Schleicher 's language–species analogy, based on William Dwight Whitney's critical writings, to turn focus to the internal elements of

639-492: A self-interested conduct) leads to an increase of complexity and diversity in a community, creating a society. The structuralist reference became essential when linguistic 'structuralism' was established by the Prague linguistic circle after Saussure's death, following a shift from structural to functional explanation in the social anthropology of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski . Saussure himself had actually used

710-495: A set must have something in common with one another, but they must contrast too, otherwise they could not be distinguished from each other and would collapse into a single unit, which could not constitute a set on its own, since a set always consists of more than one unit. Syntagmatic relations, in contrast, are concerned with how units, once selected from their paradigmatic sets of oppositions, are 'chained' together into structural wholes. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations provide

781-585: A theory of the standard language and of language cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years. The Prague School has had a significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics . After the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948 , the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School continued as

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852-498: Is a sign , which in turn has two components: a "signified" is an idea or concept, while the "signifier" is a means of expressing the signified. The "sign", e.g. a word, is thus the combined association of signifier and signified. The value of a sign can be defined only by being placed in contrast with other signs. This forms the basis of what later became the paradigmatic dimension of semiotic organization (i.e., terms and inventories of terms that stand in opposition to each other). This

923-425: Is a double-levelled or doubly articulated system. In this context, 'articulation' means 'joining'. The first level of articulation involves minimally meaningful units ( monemes : words or morphemes ), while the second level consists of minimally distinct non-signifying units ( phonemes ). Owing to double articulation, it is possible to construct all necessary words of a language with a couple dozen phonic units. Meaning

994-452: Is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis , which define units syntactically and lexically , respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data,

1065-462: Is alternatively called distributionalism , 'American descriptivism', or the 'Bloomfieldian' school – or 'post-Bloomfieldian', following the death of its leader Leonard Bloomfield in 1949. Nevertheless, Wundt's ideas had already been imported from Germany to American humanities by Franz Boas before him, influencing linguists such as Edward Sapir . Bloomfield named his psychological approach descriptive or philosophical–descriptive; as opposed to

1136-469: Is associated with combinations of the non-meaningful units. The organisation of language into hierarchical inventories makes highly complex and therefore highly useful language possible: Louis Hjelmslev 's conception includes even more levels: phoneme, morpheme, lexeme, phrase, sentence and discourse . Building on the smallest meaningful and non-meaningful elements, glossemes , it is possible to generate an infinite number of productions: These notions are

1207-503: Is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism . Saussure's Course in General Linguistics , published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure

1278-466: Is contrasted drastically with the idea that linguistic structures can be examined in isolation from meaning, or that the organisation of the conceptual system can exist without a corresponding organisation of the signifying system. Paradigmatic relations hold among sets of units, such as the set distinguished phonologically by variation in their initial sound cat, bat, hat, mat, fat , or the morphologically distinguished set ran, run, running . The units of

1349-498: Is distinct from all others in the conceptual system, and is defined in opposition with other concepts. Louis Hjelmslev laid the foundation of structural semantics with his idea that the content-level of language has a structure analogous to the level of expression. Structural explanation in the sense of how language shapes our understanding of the world has been widely used by the post-structuralists . Structural linguist Lucien Tesnière , who invented dependency grammar , considered

1420-411: Is distinct from physical reality. For example, the spoken sign 'cat' is an association between the combination of the sounds [k], [æ] and [t] and the concept of a cat, rather than with its referent (an actual cat). Each item in the conceptual inventory is associated with an expression; and these two levels define, organise and restrict each other. Key concepts of the organisation of the phonemic versus

1491-410: Is shaped differently depending on the structural characteristics of their first language. By contrast, research evidence has failed to support the inverse idea that syntactic structures reflect the way the brain naturally prefers to process syntactic structures. It is argued that Functional Grammar , deriving from Saussure, is compatible with the view of language that arises from brain research and from

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1562-815: Is the study of the general features of languages in the world. He also influenced Nicolas Ruwet 's paradigmatic analysis . Jakobson has also influenced Friedemann Schulz von Thun 's four sides model , as well as Michael Silverstein 's metapragmatics , Dell Hymes 's ethnography of communication and ethnopoetics , the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan , and philosophy of Giorgio Agamben . Jakobson's legacy among researchers specializing in Slavics, and especially Slavic linguistics in North America, has been enormous, for example, Olga Yokoyama . Structural linguistics Structural linguistics, or structuralism , in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language

1633-497: The Karolinska Hospital (with works on aphasia and language competence). When Swedish colleagues feared a possible German occupation, he managed to leave on a cargo ship, together with Ernst Cassirer (the former rector of Hamburg University) to New York City in 1941 to become part of the wider community of intellectual émigrés who fled there. In New York, he began teaching at The New School , still closely associated with

1704-749: The Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages and then at the Historical-Philological Faculty of Moscow University . 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; he was especially interested in Russian Futurism , the Russian incarnation of Italian Futurism . Under the pseudonym 'Aliagrov', he published books of zaum poetry and befriended

1775-520: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he was an honorary professor emeritus. In the early 1960s, Jakobson shifted his emphasis to a more comprehensive view of language and began writing about communication sciences as a whole. He converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 1975. Jakobson died in Cambridge, Massachusetts , on 18 July 1982. His widow died in 1986. His first wife, who

1846-459: The Organon-Model by Karl Bühler , Jakobson distinguishes six communication functions, each associated with a dimension or factor of the communication process [n.b. – Elements from Bühler's theory appear in the diagram below in yellow and pink, Jakobson's elaborations in blue]: One of the six functions is always the dominant function in a text and usually related to the type of text. In poetry,

1917-509: The cross-linguistic study of linguistic structures . Those working in the generativist tradition often regard structuralist approaches as outdated and superseded. For example, Mitchell Marcus writes that structural linguistics was "fundamentally inadequate to process the full range of natural language". Holland writes that Chomsky had "decisively refuted Saussure". Similar views have been expressed by Jan Koster , Mark Turner , and other advocates of sociobiology . Others however stress

1988-502: The psychological and positivistic orientation of the Bloomfieldian school, and the semiotic orientation of the structuralists proper. In the generative or Chomskyan concept, a purported rejection of 'structuralism' usually refers to Noam Chomsky 's opposition to the behaviourism of Bloomfield's 1933 textbook Language ; though, coincidentally, he is also opposed to structuralism proper. The foundation of structural linguistics

2059-424: The typological study of linguistic structures. In Hjelmslev's interpretation, there are no physical, psychological or other a priori principles that explain why languages are the way they are. Cross-linguistic similarities on the expression plane depend on a necessity to express meaning; conversely, cross-linguistic similarities on the content plane depend on the necessity to structure meaning potential according to

2130-605: The Czech émigré community during that period. At the École libre des hautes études , a sort of Francophone university-in-exile, he met and collaborated with Claude Lévi-Strauss , who would also become a key exponent of structuralism . He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and anthropologists , such as Franz Boas , Benjamin Whorf , and Leonard Bloomfield . When the American authorities considered "repatriating" him to Europe, it

2201-548: The Futurists Vladimir Mayakovsky , Kazimir Malevich , Aleksei Kruchyonykh and others. It was the poetry of his contemporaries that partly inspired him to become a linguist. 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

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2272-599: The Russian émigrés Roman Jakobson , Nikolai Trubetzkoy , and Sergei Karcevskiy , as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský . The instigator of the circle, and its first president until his death in 1945, was the Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius . In 1929 the Circle promulgated its theses in a paper submitted to the First Congress of Slavists . "The programmatic 1929 Prague Theses , surely one of

2343-540: The Ukrainian language. Jakobson's three principal ideas in linguistics play a major role in the field to this day: linguistic typology , markedness , and linguistic universals . The three concepts are tightly intertwined: typology is the classification of languages in terms of shared grammatical features (as opposed to shared origin), markedness is (very roughly) a study of how certain forms of grammatical organization are more "optimized" than others, and linguistic universals

2414-529: The academic and cultural life of pre-World War II Czechoslovakia and established close relationships with a number of Czech poets and literary figures. Jakobson received his Ph.D. from Charles University in 1930. He became a professor at Masaryk University in Brno in 1933. He also made an impression on Czech academics with his studies of Czech verse. Roman Jakobson proposed the Atlas Linguarum Europae in

2485-673: The approach pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure , known as " structuralism ", became a major post-war intellectual movement in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, though the influence of structuralism declined during the 1970s, Jakobson's work has continued to receive attention in linguistic anthropology , especially through the ethnography of communication developed by Dell Hymes and the semiotics of culture developed by Jakobson's former student Michael Silverstein . Jakobson's concept of underlying linguistic universals, particularly his celebrated theory of distinctive features , decisively influenced

2556-418: The association of meaning and expression. This can be contrasted with functional explanation which explains linguistic structure in relation to the "adaptation" of language to the community's communicative needs. Hjelmslev's elaboration of Saussure's structural explanation is that language arises from the structuring of content and expression. He argues that the nature of language could only be understood via

2627-512: The biological metaphor is not to be taken literally. What is more, Saussure abandoned evolutionary linguistics altogether and, instead, defined synchronic analysis as the study of the language system; and diachronic analysis as the study of language change . With such precaution, structural explanation of language is analogous to structuralism in biology which explains structures in relation with material factors or substance. In Saussure's explanation, structure follows from systemic consequences of

2698-413: The brain except to the extent that the interactive association of meaning and form occurs ultimately in the brain. Such ideas roughly correspond to the idea of language that arises from neuroimaging studies. ERP studies have found that language processing is based on the interaction of syntax and semantics rather than on innate grammatical structures. MRI studies have found that the child's brain

2769-574: The categories of the Russian verb . Drawing on insights from C. S. Peirce 's semiotics , as well as from communication theory and cybernetics , he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry, music, the visual arts , and cinema. Through his decisive influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes , among others, Jakobson became a pivotal figure in the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines beyond linguistics, including philosophy , anthropology and literary theory ; his development of

2840-490: The collective psyche of a community; and this psyche is sometimes described as an 'organism'. In sociology, Émile Durkheim made a humanistic modification of Herbert Spencer 's organic analogy . Durkheim, following Spencer's theory, compared society to an organism which has structures (organs) that carry out different functions. For Durkheim a structural explanation of society is that the population growth, through an organic solidarity (unlike Spencer who believes it happens by

2911-506: The continuing importance of Saussure's thought and structuralist approaches. Gilbert Lazard has dismissed the Chomskyan approach as passé while applauding a return to Saussurean structuralism as the only course by which linguistics can become more scientific. Matthews notes the existence of many "linguists who are structuralists by many of the definitions that have been proposed, but who would themselves vigorously deny that they are anything of

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2982-654: The decade and a half following World War I: In Europe , Saussure influenced: (1) the Geneva School of Albert Sechehaye and Charles Bally , (2) the Prague linguistic circle, (3) the Copenhagen School of Louis Hjelmslev, (4) the Paris School of André Martinet and Algirdas Julien Greimas , and the Dutch school of Simon Dik . Structural linguistics also had an influence on other disciplines of humanities bringing about

3053-466: The dominant function is the poetic function: the focus is on the message itself. The true hallmark of poetry is according to Jakobson "the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination". Very broadly speaking, it implies that poetry successfully combines and integrates form and function, that poetry turns the poetry of grammar into the grammar of poetry, so to speak. Jakobson's theory of communicative functions

3124-472: The early thinking of Noam Chomsky , who became the dominant figure in theoretical linguistics during the second half of the twentieth century. Jakobson was born in Moscow on 11 October [ O.S. 29 September] 1896 to well-to-do parents of Jewish descent, the industrialist Osip Jakobson and chemist Anna Volpert Jakobson, and he developed a fascination with language at a very young age. He studied at

3195-442: The historical–comparative study of languages. Structural linguists like Hjelmslev considered his work fragmentary because it eluded a full account of language. The concept of autonomy is also different: while structural linguists consider semiology (the bilateral sign system) separate from physiology , American descriptivists argued for the autonomy of syntax from semantics. All in all, there were unsolvable incompatibilities between

3266-454: The interaction of meaning and expression. Instead, it was thought that the civilised human mind is organised into binary branching structures. Advocates of this type of structuralism are identified from their use of 'philosophical grammar' with its convention of placing the object , but not the subject , into the verb phrase ; whereby the structure is disconnected from semantics in sharp contrast to Saussurean structuralism. This American school

3337-416: The introduction of the ostensive sign. Today the Prague linguistic circle is a scholarly society which aims to contribute to the knowledge of language and related sign systems according to functionally structural principles. To this end, it organizes regular meetings with lectures and debates, publishes professional publications, and organizes international meetings. The Prague linguistic circle included

3408-505: The kind", suggesting a persistence of the structuralist paradigm. In the 1950s Saussure's ideas were appropriated by several prominent figures in continental philosophy , anthropology , and from there were borrowed in literary theory , where they are used to interpret novels and other texts. However, several critics have charged that Saussure's ideas have been misunderstood or deliberately distorted by continental philosophers and literary theorists and are certainly not directly applicable to

3479-490: The language organism, or system. Nonetheless, structural linguistics became mainly associated with Saussure's notion of language as a dual interactive system of symbols and concepts. The term structuralism was adopted to linguistics after Saussure's death by the Prague school linguists Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy ; while the term structural linguistics was coined by Louis Hjelmslev . Structural linguistics begins with

3550-491: The late 1930s to the 1940s, during which he developed the notion that "binary distinctive features" were the foundational element in language, and that such distinctiveness is "mere otherness" or differentiation. In the third stage in Jakobson's work, from the 1950s to 1960s, he worked with the acoustician C. Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle (a student of Jakobson's) to consider the acoustic aspects of distinctive features. Influenced by

3621-428: The late 1930s, but World War II disrupted this plan and it laid dormant until being revived by Mario Alinei in 1965 . Jakobson escaped from Prague in early March 1939 via Berlin for Denmark , where he was associated with the Copenhagen linguistic circle , and such intellectuals as Louis Hjelmslev . He fled to Norway on 1 September 1939, and in 1940 walked across the border to Sweden, where he continued his work at

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3692-414: The meaningful semantic arrangement to break into a largely arbitrary word ordering. Saussure's model of language emergence, the speech circuit , entails that la langue (language itself) is external to the brain and is received via la parole (language usage). While Saussure mostly employed interactive models, the speech circuit suggests that the brain is shaped by language, but language is not shaped by

3763-454: The most imposing linguistic edifices of the 20th century, incapsulated [sic] the functionalist credo." In the late 20th century, English translations of the Circle's seminal works were published by the Czech linguist Josef Vachek in several collections. Also in 1929, the group launched a journal, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague . World War II brought an end to it. The Travaux was briefly resurrected in 1966–1971. The inaugural issue

3834-493: The movement known as structuralism . Some confusion is caused by the fact that an American school of linguistics of 1910s through 1950s, which was based on structural psychology , (especially Wilhelm Wundt 's Völkerpsychologie ); and later on behavioural psychology , is sometimes nicknamed 'American structuralism'. This framework was not structuralist in the Saussurean sense that it did not consider language as arising from

3905-651: The necessities of expression. "The linguist must be equally interested in the similarity and in the difference between languages, two complementary sides of the same thing. The similarity between languages is their very structural principle; the difference between languages is the carrying out of that principle in concreto . Both the similarity and the difference between languages lie, then, in language and in languages themselves, in their internal structure; and no similarity or difference between languages rests on any factor outside language." – Louis Hjelmslev According to André Martinet 's concept of double articulation , language

3976-414: 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's structure served its basic function ( synchronic approach) – to communicate information between speakers. Jakobson was also well known for his critique of the emergence of sound in film. Jakobson received a master's degree from Moscow University in 1918. Although he

4047-454: The phonological development in Slavic languages as motivated only in Russian and Serbo-Croatian languages, while all other Slavic languages, including Ukrainian, are considered as devoid of independent development, subject only to Russian and Serbo-Croatian tendencies. In the same spirit, in his article about the Ukrainian imperative (1965), Jacobson tried to downplay the peculiarities of this form in

4118-683: The posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics in 1916, which his students compiled from his lectures. The book proved to be highly influential, providing the foundation for both modern linguistics and semiotics . Structuralist linguistics is often thought of as giving rise to independent European and American traditions due to ambiguity in the term. It is most commonly thought that structural linguistics stems from Saussure's writings; but these were rejected by an American school of linguistics based on Wilhelm Wundt 's structural psychology . John E. Joseph identifies several defining features of structuralism that emerged in

4189-423: The preface to the second edition of The Sound Shape of Language argues that this book represents the fourth stage in "Jakobson's quest to uncover the function and structure of sound in language." The first stage was roughly the 1920s to 1930s where he collaborated with Trubetzkoy , in which they developed the concept of the phoneme, and elucidated the structure of phonological systems. The second stage, from roughly

4260-441: The priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena. Structuralism as a term, however, was not used by Saussure, who called the approach semiology . The term structuralism is derived from sociologist Émile Durkheim 's anti-Darwinian modification of Herbert Spencer 's organic analogy which draws

4331-424: The relationship between a paradigmatic organisation of language as a motivator and classifier for syntagmatic configurations was provided by Louis Hjelmslev in his Prolegomena to a Theory of Language , giving rise to formal linguistics . Hjelmslev's model was subsequently incorporated into systemic functional grammar , functional discourse grammar , and Danish functional grammar . In structuralism, elements of

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4402-431: The relationship between meaning and form as conflicting due to a mathematical difference in how syntactic and semantic structure is organised. He used his concept of antinomy between syntax and semantics to elucidate the concept of a language as a solution to the communication problem. From his perspective, the two-dimensional semantic dependency structure is necessarily forced into one-dimensional (linear) form. This causes

4473-535: The semantic system are those of opposition and distinctiveness. Each phoneme is distinct from other phonemes of the phonological system of a given language. The concepts of distinctiveness and markedness were successfully used by the Prague Linguistic Circle to explain the phonemic organisation of languages, laying a ground for modern phonology as the study of the sound systems of languages, also borrowing from Wilhelm von Humboldt . Likewise, each concept

4544-523: The structural linguist with a tool for categorization for phonology, morphology and syntax. Take morphology, for example. The signs cat and cats are associated in the mind, producing an abstract paradigm of the word forms of cat . Comparing this with other paradigms of word forms, we can note that, in English, the plural often consists of little more than adding an -s to the end of the word. Likewise, through paradigmatic and syntagmatic analysis, we can discover

4615-478: The syntax of sentences. For instance, contrasting the syntagma je dois ("I should") and dois je? ("Should I?") allows us to realize that in French we only have to invert the units to turn a statement into a question. We thus take syntagmatic evidence (difference in structural configurations) as indicators of paradigmatic relations (e.g., in the present case: questions vs. assertions). The most detailed account of

4686-431: The textual level, which Saussure himself would have firmly placed within parole and so not amenable to his theoretical constructs. Prague linguistic circle The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists , philologists and literary critics in Prague . Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and

4757-517: Was Franz Boas who actually saved his life. After the war, he became a consultant to the International Auxiliary Language Association , which would present Interlingua in 1951. In 1949 Jakobson moved to Harvard University , where he remained until his retirement in 1967. His universalizing structuralist theory of phonology , based on a markedness hierarchy of distinctive features , achieved its canonical exposition in

4828-465: Was born in 1908, died in 2000. According to Jakobson's own personal reminiscences, the most decisive stage in the development of his thinking was the period of revolutionary anticipation and upheaval in Russia between 1912 and 1920, when, as a young student, he fell under the spell of the celebrated Russian futurist wordsmith and linguistic thinker Velimir Khlebnikov . Offering a slightly different picture,

4899-480: Was first published in "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics" (in Thomas A. Sebeok , Style In Language , Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960, pp. 350–377). Despite its wide adoption, the six-functions model has been criticized for lacking specific interest in the "play function" of language that, according to an early review by Georges Mounin, is "not enough studied in general by linguistics researchers". As

4970-568: Was initially an enthusiastic supporter of the Bolshevik revolution, Jakobson soon became disillusioned as his early hopes for an explosion of creativity in the arts fell victim to increasing state conservatism and hostility. He left Moscow for Prague in 1920, where he worked as a member of the Soviet diplomatic mission while continuing with his doctoral studies. Living in Czechoslovakia meant that Jakobson

5041-592: Was physically close to the linguist who would be his most important collaborator during the 1920s and 1930s, Prince Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who fled Russia at the time of the Revolution and took up a chair at Vienna in 1922. In 1926 the Prague school of linguistic theory was established by the professor of English at Charles University, Vilém Mathesius , with Jakobson as a founding member and a prime intellectual force (other members included Nikolai Trubetzkoy , René Wellek and Jan Mukařovský ). Jakobson immersed himself in both

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