Roman jakobson (1896 ~ 1982) is an old master of Prague School and a pioneer of structuralism. He is a Jew and was born in Russia. He studied at Moscow University in his early years and graduated with a master's degree in 19 18. During my study, I participated in the establishment of the Moscow Linguistics Group. 1920, at the age of 24, Jacobson became a professor at the Advanced Theatre Academy in Moscow. 192 1 moved to the Czech Republic, 194 1 exiled to the United States as a Jew. He first taught at Columbia University (1943 ~ 1949) and then was employed by Harvard University (1949 ~ 65438+). Before his death, he was an academician of nine academies of science, won 25 honorary doctorates and wrote more than 500 books.
Jacobson's linguistic research covers a wide range-from the most "professional" phoneme theory to the most "extensive" poetics, in which the most meaningful and enlightening thought is the binary opposition between metaphor and metonymy. The origin of this idea still comes from Saussure's view that horizontal combination and vertical combination are binary opposites, that is, the activities of language system are carried out on two coordinate axes; The first is the horizontal sentence (chain) relationship.
Roman jakobson is not only a linguist, but also a poetry critic. He used extensive linguistic knowledge to connect structuralist linguistics with poetry criticism, revealed the mystery of "why poetry text is poetry" from the linguistic form of poetry, and established the method of linguistic poetics criticism.
Jacobson has long associated linguistics with poetry, and his formalism poetry theory is very insightful, such as "Poetry exposes its own language means" and "Poetry is a free word". However, Jacobson's main contribution to the practice of poetry criticism lies in the separation of a "poetic function" from the comparative study of the overall communicative function of language, and a thorough linguistic analysis of the formation process of this function, thus theoretically explaining the reasons why poetic language is different from other languages. This explanation is groundbreaking and reveals the internal generation mechanism of "poetic language becomes poetic language".
His main works include: meaningless books, futurism, Czech poetry, linguistics and poetics, and themes of literature and linguistics (co-authored with Tinyanov).