Roman Jakobson Quotes

Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx.

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics.

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms.

When I speak it is in order to be heard.

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified.

Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components.

For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc.

What’s next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography.

The poetic function is the set towards the message itself, focus on the message for its own sake which by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects.

From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds.

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.