26 Quotes by Roman Jakobson

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

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.

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.

The function of poetry is to point out that the sign is not identical to the referent.

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

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

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.