Editing Roman Jakobson (section)

== Intellectual contributions ==
According to Jakobson's own personal reminiscences, the most decisive stage in the development of his thinking was the period of revolutionary anticipation and upheaval in Russia between 1912 and 1920, when, as a young student, he fell under the spell of the celebrated Russian futurist wordsmith and linguistic thinker [[Velimir Khlebnikov]].<ref>Knight, Chris, 2018. 'Incantation by Laughter', chapter 11 in ''Decoding Chomsky: Science and revolutionary politics.'' London & New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 91–103.</ref>
 
Offering a slightly different picture, the preface to the second edition of ''The Sound Shape of Language'' argues that this book represents the fourth stage in "Jakobson's quest to uncover the function and structure of sound in language."<ref name=":0">{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xrZTFHTD-r4C&q=jakobson%20saussure%20%22fig.%20*%22&pg=PA1|title=The Sound Shape of Language|last1=Jakobson|first1=Roman|last2=Waugh|first2=Linda R.|date=1 January 2002|publisher=Walter de Gruyter|isbn=9783110889451|language=en}}</ref> The first stage was roughly the 1920s to 1930s where he collaborated with [[Nikolai Trubetzkoy|Trubetzkoy]], in which they developed the concept of the phoneme, and elucidated the structure of phonological systems. The second stage, from roughly the late 1930s to the 1940s, during which he developed the notion that "binary distinctive features" were the foundational element in language, and that such distinctiveness is "mere otherness" or differentiation.<ref name=":0" /> In the third stage in Jakobson's work, from the 1950s to the 1960s, he worked with the acoustician C. Gunnar Fant and Morris Halle (a student of Jakobson's) to consider the acoustic aspects of distinctive features.

===The communication functions===
{{main|Jakobson's functions of language}}
Influenced by the [[Organon-Model]] by [[Karl Bühler]], Jakobson distinguishes six communication functions, each associated with a dimension or factor of the communication process [n.b. – Elements from Bühler's theory appear in the diagram below in yellow and pink, Jakobson's elaborations in blue]:
*Functions
#referential (: contextual information)
#aesthetic/poetic (: auto-reflection)
#emotive (: self-expression)
#conative (: vocative or imperative addressing of receiver)
#phatic (: checking channel working)
#metalingual (: checking code working)<ref name="Middleton"/>

[[Image:Roma jakobson theory.png|center|<ref name="Middleton">Middleton, Richard (1990/2002). ''Studying Popular Music'', p.241. Philadelphia: Open University Press. {{ISBN|0-335-15275-9}}.</ref>]]

One of the six functions is always the dominant function in a text and usually related to the type of text. In poetry, the dominant function is the poetic function: the focus is on the message itself. The true hallmark of poetry is according to Jakobson "the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination". Very broadly speaking, it implies that poetry successfully combines and integrates form and function, that poetry turns the poetry of grammar into the grammar of poetry, so to speak. Jakobson's theory of communicative functions was first published in "Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics" (in [[Thomas A. Sebeok]], ''Style in Language'', Cambridge Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1960, pp.&nbsp;350–377). Despite its wide adoption, the six-functions model has been criticized for lacking specific interest in the "play function" of language that, according to an early review by Georges Mounin, is "not enough studied in general by linguistics researchers".<ref>Mounin, Georges (1972) La linguistique du XX siècle. Presses Universitaires de France</ref>

===Political dimension of his work===
As a Russophile, in his "Remarques sur l'évolution phonologique du russe comparée a celle des autres langues slaves" ("Remarks on the phonological evolution of the Russian language in comparison with other Slavic languages", 1929) and similarly in "Slavische Sprachfragen in der Sovjetunion" ("Slavic Language Questions in the Soviet Union", 1934, an attack on the policy of Ukrainization and its proponents) he presented the phonological development in Slavic languages as motivated only in Russian and Serbo-Croatian languages, while all other Slavic languages, including Ukrainian, are considered as devoid of independent development, subject only to Russian and Serbo-Croatian tendencies. In the same spirit, in his article about the Ukrainian imperative (1965), Jacobson tried to downplay the peculiarities of this form in the Ukrainian language.