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Sound and Meaning: The Roman Jakobson Series in Linguistics and Poetics
Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure
Edited and with an introduction by Anatoly Liberman
Translated by Marvin Taylor and Anatoly Liberman N. S. Trubetzkoy (1890–1939) is generally celebrated today as the creator of the science of phonology. While his monumental Grundzüge der Phonologie was published posthumously and contains a summary of Trubetzkoy’s late views on the linguistic function of speech sounds, there has, until now, been no practical way to trace the development of his thought or to clarify the conclusions appearing in that later work. With the publication of Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure , not only will linguists have that opportunity, but a collection of Trubetzkoy’s work will appear in English for the first time.
Translated from the French, German, and Russian originals, these articles and letters present Trubetzkoy’s work in general and on Indo-European linguistics. The correspondence reprinted here, also for the first time in English, is between Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. The resulting collection offers a view of the evolution of Trubetzkoy’s ideas on phonology, the logic in laws of linguistic geography and relative chronology, and the breadth of his involvement with Caucasian phonology and the Finno-Ugric languages.
A valuable resource, this volume will make Trubetzkoy’s work available to a larger audience as it sheds light on problems that remain at the center of contemporary linguistics.
Translated by Marvin Taylor and Anatoly Liberman N. S. Trubetzkoy (1890–1939) is generally celebrated today as the creator of the science of phonology. While his monumental Grundzüge der Phonologie was published posthumously and contains a summary of Trubetzkoy’s late views on the linguistic function of speech sounds, there has, until now, been no practical way to trace the development of his thought or to clarify the conclusions appearing in that later work. With the publication of Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure , not only will linguists have that opportunity, but a collection of Trubetzkoy’s work will appear in English for the first time.
Translated from the French, German, and Russian originals, these articles and letters present Trubetzkoy’s work in general and on Indo-European linguistics. The correspondence reprinted here, also for the first time in English, is between Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. The resulting collection offers a view of the evolution of Trubetzkoy’s ideas on phonology, the logic in laws of linguistic geography and relative chronology, and the breadth of his involvement with Caucasian phonology and the Finno-Ugric languages.
A valuable resource, this volume will make Trubetzkoy’s work available to a larger audience as it sheds light on problems that remain at the center of contemporary linguistics.
344 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
23 people want to read
About the author
Nikolai S. Trubetzkoy
10 books3 followersPrince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (also Troubetskoy; Russian: Никола́й Серге́евич Трубецко́й; was a Russian linguist and historian whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology. He was also associated with the Russian Eurasianists.
Trubetzkoy was born into an extremely refined environment. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetzkoy, came from a Gediminid princely family. Having graduated from the Moscow University (1913), Trubetzkoy delivered lectures there until the revolution. Thereafter he moved first to the university of Rostov-na-Donu, then to the University of Sofia (1920–22), and finally took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna (1922-1938). He died from a heart attack attributed to Nazi persecution following his publishing an article highly critical of Hitler's theories.
Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology, in particular in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in the search for general and universal phonological laws. His magnum opus, Grundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology), was issued posthumously. In this book he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics.
It is sometimes hard to distinguish Trubetzkoy's views from those of his friend Roman Jakobson, who should be credited with spreading the Prague School views on phonology after Trubetzkoy's death.
Trubetzkoy was born into an extremely refined environment. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetzkoy, came from a Gediminid princely family. Having graduated from the Moscow University (1913), Trubetzkoy delivered lectures there until the revolution. Thereafter he moved first to the university of Rostov-na-Donu, then to the University of Sofia (1920–22), and finally took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna (1922-1938). He died from a heart attack attributed to Nazi persecution following his publishing an article highly critical of Hitler's theories.
Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology, in particular in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in the search for general and universal phonological laws. His magnum opus, Grundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology), was issued posthumously. In this book he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics.
It is sometimes hard to distinguish Trubetzkoy's views from those of his friend Roman Jakobson, who should be credited with spreading the Prague School views on phonology after Trubetzkoy's death.
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