Editing Roman Jakobson (section)

===Career in the United States and later life ===
[[File:Roman Jakobson.jpg|thumb|Roman Jakobson]]
In New York, he began teaching at [[The New School]], still closely associated with the Czech émigré community during that period. At the [[École libre des hautes études]], a sort of Francophone university-in-exile, he met and collaborated with [[Claude Lévi-Strauss]], who would also become a key exponent of [[structuralism]]. He also made the acquaintance of many American linguists and [[anthropology|anthropologists]], such as [[Franz Boas]], [[Benjamin Whorf]], and [[Leonard Bloomfield]]. When the American authorities considered "repatriating" him to Europe, it was Franz Boas who actually saved his life.{{citation needed|date=December 2021}} After the war, he became a consultant to the [[International Auxiliary Language Association]], which would present [[Interlingua]] in 1951.

In 1949<ref name="Kucera"/> Jakobson moved to [[Harvard University]], where he remained until his retirement in 1967.<ref name="Kucera"/> His universalizing structuralist theory of [[phonology]], based on a [[markedness]] hierarchy of [[distinctive features]], achieved its canonical exposition in a book published in the United States in 1951, jointly authored by Roman Jakobson, C. Gunnar Fant and [[Morris Halle]].<ref>Jakobson, R., C. Gunnar Fant and M. Halle, 1951. ''Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The distinctive features and their correlates.'' Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.</ref> In the same year, Jakobson's theory of 'distinctive features' made a profound impression on the thinking of young Noam Chomsky, in this way also influencing generative linguistics.<ref>Knight, Chris, 2018. "Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics". London & New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 85–90.</ref> He was elected a foreign member of the [[Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences]] in 1960.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.dwc.knaw.nl/biografie/pmknaw/?pagetype=authorDetail&aId=PE00001090 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201012193255/https://www.dwc.knaw.nl/biografie/pmknaw/?pagetype=authorDetail&aId=PE00001090 |title=R.O. Jakobson (1896–1982) |publisher=Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences |archive-date=12 October 2020}}</ref>

In his last decade, Jakobson maintained an office at the [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology]], where he was an honorary professor emeritus. In the early 1960s, Jakobson shifted his emphasis to a more comprehensive view of language and began writing about communication sciences as a whole. He converted to [[Eastern Orthodox Church|Eastern Orthodox Christianity]] in 1975.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Jakobson_Roman_Osipovich |title=YIVO &#124; Jakobson, Roman Osipovich |publisher=Yivoencyclopedia.org |access-date=2014-01-17}}</ref>

Jakobson died in [[Cambridge, Massachusetts]], on 18 July 1982.<ref name="Kucera"/><ref name="rudy">[http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc72.html#ref8425 "Roman Jakobson: A Brief Chronology"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160126001813/http://libraries.mit.edu/archives/research/collections/collections-mc/mc72.html#ref8425 |date=26 January 2016 }}, compiled by Stephen Rudy</ref> His widow died in 1986. His first wife, who was born in 1908, died in 2000.