Jakobson Quotes & Sayings

In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified. — Roman Jakobson

The only time I've played a real baddy was when I was Regan in 'King Lear.' — Ashley Jensen

Bilingualism is for me the fundamental problem of linguistics. — Roman Jakobson

Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it. — Roman Jakobson

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features. — Roman Jakobson

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. — Roman Jakobson

A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography. — Roman Jakobson

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. — Roman Jakobson

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession. — Roman Jakobson

The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning. — Roman Jakobson

From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds. — Roman Jakobson

I used to have acne when I was a kid growing up. You can imagine how serious that was in making you feel bad. And I had skinny bow legs. I mean, as a kid growing up, I was an insecure fella. — Mike Wallace

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. — Roman Jakobson

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

A lot of my mates are actors and it's lovely to be able to work with friends. — Luke Treadaway

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

She didn't protect her own computers with a password, even the one she worked on here at the B and B. But there was hardly any crime in Whiskey Creek, and she had nothing to hide. — Brenda Novak

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

The question now was ... whether that beautiful fabric [the English constitution] ... was to be maintained in that freedom ... for which blood had been spilt; or whether we were to submit to that system of despotism, which had so many advocates in this country. — Charles James Fox

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

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. — Roman Jakobson

A linguist deaf to the poetic functions of language and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistics are equally flagrant anachronisms. — Roman Jakobson

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

Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic. — Roman Jakobson

I don't know what happened, but I do know this. It's not going anywhere. When you light up it waits for you to come down. You have to confront whatever's bothering you and look it straight in the eye. It's alright to forgive yourself, and it's okay to fight back, because if you don't kick the shit out of it, then it kicks you. It's a dog world, but you can control it, if you want to. A lot of people are going to try to make you feel like shit, but that doesn't mean you are. You are who you decide to be. I hope you're the kind of person that fights, because that's the only way to win. — E.M. Youman

When I speak it is in order to be heard. — Roman Jakobson

When people grow old and look back on their lives, they don't regret what they did, they regret what they didn't do. — Joan Caraganis Jakobson

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding. — Roman Jakobson

Stopping at the sound of the words he just spoke, my cheeks warmed and my pussy meowed. Yes, it meowed like a hungry feline. — K.M. Golland

You feel like you stopped living when he went missing. You feel like the rest of your days are killing time until it's time to die. — Taylor Jenkins Reid

Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx. — Roman Jakobson

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. — Roman Jakobson

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features. — Roman Jakobson

I want to be more successful as a mother than I am in show business. — Celine Dion

I think that whenever children be born that are not wanted they should be killed directly, before their souls come to 'em, and not allowed to grow big and walk about! — Thomas Hardy

Man is so intelligent that he feels impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations. So that when he acts on his theories, he behaves very often like a lunatic. — Aldous Huxley