Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and one of the central figures in twentieth-century structural linguistics. He was a founding member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and later the Prague Linguistic Circle, where he helped develop structuralist phonology, the study of how sounds function as a system of contrasts within a language rather than as isolated physical events. After emigrating from Europe during the Second World War, Jakobson taught at Columbia University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and he proposed an influential model of the six functions of language, including the poetic function, describing the different purposes an utterance can serve beyond simply conveying information. His close collaboration with the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss also helped extend structuralist methods from linguistics into anthropology, making Jakobson one of the most widely cited linguists of the twentieth century.