Roman Jakobson Quotes & Sayings (Page 2)

“It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification.”

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

“Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve.”

“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.”

“Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.”

“When I speak it is in order to be heard.”

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

“At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.”