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Fundamentos del lenguaje
This volume consists of two studies. The first is a joint essay presenting a critical survey of the author's views on phonology, a theory of sound patterns, and their stratification. The second is an individual contribution from Roman Jakobson ranging widely over many problems of language and its disturbances, literature and general symbolic behaviour.
150 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1956
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About the author
Roman Jakobson
192 books88 followersRoman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist, formalist, and literary theorist.
As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century. Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology. He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language). He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from Charles Sanders 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 anthropology and literary theory; this generalization of Saussurean methods, 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 semiotics of culture developed by his former student Michael Silverstein.
As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century. Influenced by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jakobson developed, with Nikolai Trubetzkoy, techniques for the analysis of sound systems in languages, inaugurating the discipline of phonology. He went on to apply the same techniques of analysis to syntax and morphology, and controversially proposed that they be extended to semantics (the study of meaning in language). He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb. Drawing on insights from Charles Sanders 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 anthropology and literary theory; this generalization of Saussurean methods, 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 semiotics of culture developed by his former student Michael Silverstein.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
September 30, 2017
The first part "Phonology and phonetics" is technical and difficult to read, but the second part "Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances" is very powerful and provides us with fresh new insights into nature and structure of language, literature, painting and human behavior in general, describing two fundamental poles: Metaphor (similarity, paradigm, selection) and Metonymy (contiguity, syntagm, combination).
October 25, 2014
I found this book to be entirely satisfying, which is not something I typically say about a linguistics book. This little gem is tiny, under 100 pages, but covers a lot of ground. Herein you can find the locus classicus of many fundamental ideas about how language works and how best to analyze its inner workings.
The book is divided into two sections. The first (co-authored with Morris Halle) charts the relationship between phonetics and phonology. This phonology part is pre-generative, although Chomsky's Syntactic Structures would appear in the same Janua Linguorum series a year later. Significantly, the book emphasizes the hearer's perspective, both in the definition of features in terms of auditory as well as articulatory profiles and in terms of how features are organized according to criteria such as loudness/volume, pitch/frequency, or duration/length. Jakobson and Halle make interesting claims about how phonetic systems are picked up by children and lost, in the same order but reversed, by victims of aphasia. The primary downside to this fairly terse treatment of linguistic sound systems is that there are no extended examples of analysis showing that binary features are the best way to go. Instead, the only examples are isolated words yanked out of Jakobson's polyglot brain. It would take later work (such as Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English) to make the strong case that binary features are not only adequate but optimal for the analysis of phonemic systems. If you read this book, I suggest you keep an eye out for two exceptionally modern ideas: 1) physiognomic indices, which point out the speaker to the hearer through cues in pronunciation, timbre, relative pitch, etc. thereby showing that the information contained in a message's sound is not exhausted by the message's decomposition into binary features. 2) they see the dead end which emerges when an attempt is made to treat synchrony without an understanding of change, or to see diachrony of features apart from their systemic function in the sound pattern of the language in question. To this day, phonologists are likely to represent synchronic systems which are in fact internal reconstructions.
The second part of this book is purportedly about aphasia but is in fact an exegesis on semantic systems we all (hopefully) share. Jakobson's ideas about aphasia derive from two poles, contiguity and similarity, between which lies the continuum of aphasia cases. Those with the similarity disorder can only speak about items in context; they cannot express what is topical. They speak in rheme or predicate, unable to express a topic. Their sentences tend to be well formed, but they have difficulty substituting names, instead tending to make an association by way of spatiotemporal contiguity. On the other hand, those lacking contiguity are able to name things but have no ability to link the names together into any kind of proposition. Ideas can only be elaborated through metaphorical linkages in the lexicon of the speaker. Contiguity aphasics apparently lack morphology and syntax (i.e. suffer from agrammatism). They might be able to say a set phrase (idiom chunk). If they utter a morphologically complex word, that word in unanalyzable to the speaker and cannot serve as an analogy for forming new words. Jakobson ties this all together with a comparison of metaphor and metonymy. He sees metaphor as being more basic to poetic forms in all languages and all cultures, while metonymy is foundational to unmarked language use such as simple prose narrative. He even talks about film vs. theater in a semiotic discussion of contiguity as represented in time and place.
To sum up, this book would make a great introduction to the field of linguistics. If you already have a background in linguistics, then this little book should, in a day or two, lead you to rethink some fundamentals of language.
The book is divided into two sections. The first (co-authored with Morris Halle) charts the relationship between phonetics and phonology. This phonology part is pre-generative, although Chomsky's Syntactic Structures would appear in the same Janua Linguorum series a year later. Significantly, the book emphasizes the hearer's perspective, both in the definition of features in terms of auditory as well as articulatory profiles and in terms of how features are organized according to criteria such as loudness/volume, pitch/frequency, or duration/length. Jakobson and Halle make interesting claims about how phonetic systems are picked up by children and lost, in the same order but reversed, by victims of aphasia. The primary downside to this fairly terse treatment of linguistic sound systems is that there are no extended examples of analysis showing that binary features are the best way to go. Instead, the only examples are isolated words yanked out of Jakobson's polyglot brain. It would take later work (such as Chomsky and Halle's Sound Pattern of English) to make the strong case that binary features are not only adequate but optimal for the analysis of phonemic systems. If you read this book, I suggest you keep an eye out for two exceptionally modern ideas: 1) physiognomic indices, which point out the speaker to the hearer through cues in pronunciation, timbre, relative pitch, etc. thereby showing that the information contained in a message's sound is not exhausted by the message's decomposition into binary features. 2) they see the dead end which emerges when an attempt is made to treat synchrony without an understanding of change, or to see diachrony of features apart from their systemic function in the sound pattern of the language in question. To this day, phonologists are likely to represent synchronic systems which are in fact internal reconstructions.
The second part of this book is purportedly about aphasia but is in fact an exegesis on semantic systems we all (hopefully) share. Jakobson's ideas about aphasia derive from two poles, contiguity and similarity, between which lies the continuum of aphasia cases. Those with the similarity disorder can only speak about items in context; they cannot express what is topical. They speak in rheme or predicate, unable to express a topic. Their sentences tend to be well formed, but they have difficulty substituting names, instead tending to make an association by way of spatiotemporal contiguity. On the other hand, those lacking contiguity are able to name things but have no ability to link the names together into any kind of proposition. Ideas can only be elaborated through metaphorical linkages in the lexicon of the speaker. Contiguity aphasics apparently lack morphology and syntax (i.e. suffer from agrammatism). They might be able to say a set phrase (idiom chunk). If they utter a morphologically complex word, that word in unanalyzable to the speaker and cannot serve as an analogy for forming new words. Jakobson ties this all together with a comparison of metaphor and metonymy. He sees metaphor as being more basic to poetic forms in all languages and all cultures, while metonymy is foundational to unmarked language use such as simple prose narrative. He even talks about film vs. theater in a semiotic discussion of contiguity as represented in time and place.
To sum up, this book would make a great introduction to the field of linguistics. If you already have a background in linguistics, then this little book should, in a day or two, lead you to rethink some fundamentals of language.
December 10, 2023
First part of the book is concerned with phonology and phonetics; thankfully, there are authors who explained this stuff better. Incredibly dull to read. The second part is much more interesting, as it describes aphasia and how we process metaphor and metonymy. It's a decent book, but really nothing special. It might even be outdated now.
January 28, 2020
HRV: Pročitala sam ovo kao dio izborne literature za nadolazeći usmeni iz Fonetike (DA NAPOKON SAM JEBENO PROŠLA PISMENI LET'S FUCKING GO). Prvi dio je bio dosta tehnički zahtjevan i znanstven, pa ponekad teži za pratit iako imam nekakav temelj znanja o temama; no drugi dio je jednostavniji i zanimljiviji.
ENG: Read this as part of the optional literature for my upcoming Phonetics oral exam (YES I'VE FINALLY PASSED THE WRITTEN ONE AND I AM EMOTIONAL AS FUCK AND READY TO GET THIS SHIT DONE) and it was a fast and interesting read! The first half was very technical, though having done that theory in some college classes it was somewhat familiar - and it isn't meant to be an educational book, instead it's meant to be read by people with previous knowledge of the subject - the second part helped by being extremely interesting and a lot easier to follow.
ENG: Read this as part of the optional literature for my upcoming Phonetics oral exam (YES I'VE FINALLY PASSED THE WRITTEN ONE AND I AM EMOTIONAL AS FUCK AND READY TO GET THIS SHIT DONE) and it was a fast and interesting read! The first half was very technical, though having done that theory in some college classes it was somewhat familiar - and it isn't meant to be an educational book, instead it's meant to be read by people with previous knowledge of the subject - the second part helped by being extremely interesting and a lot easier to follow.
December 24, 2022
Roman Jakobson, who was one of the leading linguists of the twentieth century, was still kicking around when I was an undergraduate at Harvard, but in the world of linguistics, I was far too lowly to be eligible for any of his courses. This paper discusses fundamental building blocks of languge mostly from the perspective of phonology and phonetics and in a separate section discusses the relationship between aphasia and language construction. It's all very dense, and I doubt that I will retain most of it. I found it interesting more for learning that scholars have developed this kind of knowledge about language structure than for the substance of what was discussed. I love languages, but I have never been good at pronunciation, and I have always found phonetics to be a bit tiresome, perhaps because I have a tin ear, so it doesn't come to me intuitively.
June 8, 2024
The next in my mini-project of classic readings in linguistics, this book is actually the first volume of the monograph series Janua Linguarum: Studia Memoriae Nicolai Van Wijk Dedicata. It contains two parts, Fundamentals of Language by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, and Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances by Jakobson.
The first part goes into depth with regard to the minimal oppositions which distinguish phonemes, and uses a terminology which I was not previously acquainted with, so it was rather difficult reading. The second part distinguishes between two types of aphasia and relates them to the two "poles" of language, the metaphoric and the metonymic or similarity and contiguity. Both parts take the theoretical side of linguistics a bit farther than my only actual college course in linguistics.
The first part goes into depth with regard to the minimal oppositions which distinguish phonemes, and uses a terminology which I was not previously acquainted with, so it was rather difficult reading. The second part distinguishes between two types of aphasia and relates them to the two "poles" of language, the metaphoric and the metonymic or similarity and contiguity. Both parts take the theoretical side of linguistics a bit farther than my only actual college course in linguistics.
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March 10, 2020یکی از آثار مهم زبانشناسیه که رومن یاکوبسن و موریس هَله نوشتن. اینجا بهاشتباه مؤلف رو فقط هله ذکر کردن. بخش اول دربارهی آواشناسی و واجشناسیه و بخش دوم دربارهی بیماران زبانپریشه و بررسی اونها از منظر زبانشناختی. البته من این کتاب رو کامل نخوندم و فقط اون بخشهایی رو خوندم که دربارهی انتخاب و جانشینی و استعاره و مَجازه. از ستاره دادن خیلی خوشم نمیاد البته، ولی به خاطر این که کامل نخوندم و احتمالاً بعدها سراغش خواهم رفت، بیستاره میذارم.
March 21, 2020
كتاب جامعي مهم وعلى كلّ طلّاب كلية الآداب قراءته سيما المسار اللغوي.
أجاد الدكتور سعيد الغانمي في ترجمته وتوضيح الأمثلة الأجنبية بإيراد أمثلة من اللغة العربية.
أعادتني قراءته إلى سنوات الطفولة، حينما كان يلفظ أخي الخاء حاءً
وكنتُ ألفظ الزاي ذالاً
وما كان ذلك إلا بسبب الحبسة
...
أجاد الدكتور سعيد الغانمي في ترجمته وتوضيح الأمثلة الأجنبية بإيراد أمثلة من اللغة العربية.
أعادتني قراءته إلى سنوات الطفولة، حينما كان يلفظ أخي الخاء حاءً
وكنتُ ألفظ الزاي ذالاً
وما كان ذلك إلا بسبب الحبسة
...
November 21, 2017
important
February 5, 2025
Way too introductory and peremptive to truly serve as an access point to Jakobson's thought.
December 7, 2022
A historical landmark that will always remain relevant to contemporary linguistics.
May 23, 2020
Interesting as a historical artefact that displays the discourse operating in Halle & Jakobson's time. Whilst there are some interesting philosophical insights in terms of aphasia towards the end (where Jakobson takes the reigns), the prose is unnecessarily dull and technical. Not really of much use to the modern linguistics student unless they're interested, and I've read people talking about Jakobson's theory with more detail and insight than what was found here.
July 14, 2016
A rating/Books on tape
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews