Roman Jakobson

Although Roman Jakobson (1886–1982) styled himself a ‘Russian philologist’, that epithet covers only a fraction of his disciplinary breadth and international impact. In a long and prolific career, he wrote about theoretical and applied linguistics, phonology, prosody, poetics, semiotics, translation theory, psycholinguistics, language universals, literary history and criticism, and historical and descriptive linguistics, especially Slavic. His robust voice and distinctive ideas attracted attention not only from language scholars, but also from literary critics, anthropologists, historians of culture, and even from neurologists. As serious work on Jakobson’s thinking and influence continues to flourish, this long-awaited new title in Routledge’s Critical Assessments of Leading Linguists series brings together the best analysis of—and commentary on—the work of one of the twentieth century’s most versatile and influential language scholars. Criticism of Jakobson is as diverse as the work itself and this four-volume set collects the most provocative and insightful reflections on Jakobson’s writings. It encompasses many points of view, reflecting Jakobson’s wide scope as a scholar and the startling fact that he was displaced repeatedly—and under threatening circumstances—from Moscow to Prague to the United States. Roman Jakobson is fully indexed and includes a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor. It is an essential work of reference and is destined to be valued by scholars and students as a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Volume I Part 1: Resources for Scholars 1. Bibliographies of Roman Jakobson’s Publications. 2. Festschriften and Memorial Volumes Created for Roman Jakobson. 3. Autobiographical Texts by Roman Jakobson. 4. Archival Resources for Research on the Work and Life of Roman Jakobson. Part 2 Overviews of Jakobson’s Life and Work 5. Stephen Rudy, ‘Roman Jakobson: A Chronology’, in Henryk Baran, Sergej I. Gindin, Nikolai Grinzer, Tat’jana Nikolaeva, Stephen Rudy, and Elena Shumilova (eds.), Roman Jakobson: Texts, Documents, Studies (Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities, 1999), pp. 83–103. 6. Henry Kucera, ‘Roman Jakobson’, Language, 1983, 59, 4, 871–83. 7. Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston, ‘Introduction: The Life, Work, and Influence of Roman Jakobson’, in Linda R. Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston, (eds.), Roman Jakobson, On Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 1–45. 8. Joseph Frank, ‘The Master Linguist’, New York Review of Books, 1984, 12, 29–33. 9. Krystyna Pomorska, ‘The Autobiography of a Scholar’, in Pomorska, Elzbieta Chodakowska, Hugh McLean, and Brent Vine (eds.), Language, Poetry, and Poetics: The Generation of the 1890s: Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Majakovskij (Berlin: Mouton, 1987), pp. 3–13. Part 3: Jakobson’s Milieu in Moscow 10. Victor Erlich, ‘Russian Formalism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1973, 34, 4, 627–38. 11. Herbert Eagle, ‘Afterword: Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism’, in Anna Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), pp. 281–304. 12. Stephen Rudy, ‘Jakobson-Aljagrov and Futurism’, in Krystyna Pomorska, Elzbieta Chodakowska, Hugh McLean, and Brent Vine (eds.), Language, Poetry, and Poetics: The Generation of the 1890s: Jakobson, Trubetzkoy, Majakovskij (Berlin: Mouton, 1987), pp. 277–90. Part 4: The Prague Linguistic Circle 13. Vilém Mathesius, ‘Ten Years of the Prague Linguistic Circle’ [1936], trans. Joseph Vachek, The Linguistic Circle of Prague: An Introduction to Its Theory and Practice (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966), pp. 137–51. 14. Milada Soucková, ‘The Prague Linguistic Circle: A Collage’, in Ladislav Matejka (ed.), Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1976), pp. 1–6. 15. Jindrich Toman, ‘The Magic of a Common Language’, The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 135–52. 16. Krystyna Pomorska, ‘The Drama of Science: Trubetzkoy’s Correspondence with Jakobson’, Jakobsonian Poetics and Slavic Narrative: From Pushkin to Solzhenitsyn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), pp. 259–71. 17. Jindrich Toman, ‘Jakobson and Bohemia/Bohemia and the East’, in Françoise Gadet and Patrick Sériot (eds.), Jakobson entre l’est et l’ouest 1915–1939 (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 1997), pp. 237–47. 18. Bengt Jangfeldt, ‘Roman Jakobson in Sweden 1940–41’, Cahiers de l’ILSL (Institut de Linguistique et des Sciences du Langage), 1997, 9, 141–9. Part 5: Jakobson’s Career in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts 19. Jindrich Toman, ‘Epilogues’, The Magic of a Common Language: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and the Prague Linguistic Circle (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 243–61. 20. Stephen O. Murray, ‘European Structuralism in America’, Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America: A Social History (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994), pp. 215–19. 21. Morris Halle, ‘The Bloomfield–Jakobson Correspondence, 1944–1946’, Language, 1988, 64, 4, 737–54. 22. Harvey Pitkin, ‘Jakobson’s Contributions to American Linguistics’, in Daniel Armstrong and C. H. van Schooneveld (eds.), Roman Jakobson: Echoes of his Scholarship (Lisse: Peter de Ridder, 1977), pp. 357–62. 23. John E. Joseph, ‘How Structuralist was "American Structuralism"?’, From Whitney to Chomsky: Essays in the History of American Linguistics (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1999), pp. 157–67. 24. Stanislaw Pomorski, ‘Remembering Roman Osipovic Jakobson’, in Henryk Baran, Sergej I. Gindin, Nikolai Grinzer, Tat’jana Nikolaeva, Stephen Rudy, and Elena Shumilova (eds.), Roman Jakobson: Texts, Documents, Studies (Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities, 1999), pp. 262–8. 25. Vyaceslav V. Ivanov, ‘Roman Jakobson: The future’, A Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896–1982 (Berlin: Mouton, 1983), pp. 47–57. 26. Hugh McLean, ‘Roman Jakobson Repatriated’, Slavonica, 1996, 3, 2, 61–7. Volume II Part 1: Jakobson’s Work on Sound Structure, its Sources and Reception 27. Morris Halle, ‘Roman Jakobson’s Contribution to the Modern Study of Speech Sounds’, in Ladislav Matejka (ed.), Sound, Sign and Meaning: Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle (Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1976), pp. 79–100. 28. Pavle Ivic, ‘Roman Jakobson and the Growth of Phonology’ (review of Selected Writings I. Phonological Studies), Linguistics, 1965, 3, 18, 35–78. 29. Thomas A. Sebeok, review of Selected Writings I. Phonological Studies, Language, 1965, 41, 1, 77–88. 30. Noam Chomsky, review of Fundamentals of Language, International Journal of American Linguistics, 1957, 23, 3, 234–42. 31. Boris Gasparov, ‘Futurism and Phonology: Futurist Roots of Jakobson’s Approach to Language’, in Françoise Gadet and Patrick Sériot (eds.), Jakobson entre l’est et l’ouest 1915–1939 (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 1997), pp. 109–29. 32. L’ubomír Durovic, ‘The Ontology of the Phoneme in Early Prague Linguistic Circle’, in Françoise Gadet and Patrick Sériot (eds.), Jakobson entre l’est et l’ouest 1915–1939 (Lausanne: Université de Lausanne, 1997), pp. 69–76. 33. Gregory M. Eramian, ‘Some Notes on Trubetzkoy’s Abandonment of Disjunctive Oppositions’, Historiographia Linguistica, 1978, 5, 3, 275–88. 34. Juana Gil, ‘The Binarity Hypothesis in Phonology: 1938–1985’, Historiographia Linguistica, 1989, 16, 1/2, 61–88. Part 2: Jakobsonian Distinctive Features 35. Morris Halle, ‘On the Origins of the Distinctive Features’, in Morris Halle (ed.), Roman Jakobson: What He Taught Us (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1983), pp. 77–86. 36. Stephen R. Anderson, ‘Roman Jakobson and the Theory of Distinctive Features’, Phonology on the Twentieth Century: Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 116–39. 37. Yuen Ren Chao, review of Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates, Romance Philology, 1954/5, 8, 40–6. 38. Paul L. Garvin, review of Preliminaries to Speech Analysis: The Distinctive Features and Their Correlates, Language, 1953, 29, 4, 472–81. 39. Robert A. Hall, review of Phonemic Analysis of the Word in Turinese, Symposium, 1950, 4, 2, 441–6. 40. E. Colin Cherry, ‘Jakobson’s "Distinctive Features" as the Normal Co-ordinates of a Language’, in Morris Halle, Horace G. Lunt, Hugh McLean, and Cornelis H. Van Schooneveld (eds.), For Roman Jakobson (The Hague: Mouton, 1956), pp. 60–4. 41. Robert D. Wilson, ‘A Criticism of Distinctive Features’, Journal of Linguistics, 1966, 2, 2, 195–206. 42. Peter Ladefoged, ‘Phonological Features and their Phonetic Correlates’, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 1972, 2, 1, 2–12. 43. Gilbert Rappaport, ‘Distinctive and Redundant Contrasts in Jakobsonian Phonology: A Review Article’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 1981, 25, 3, 94–108. 44. Gunnar Fant, ‘Features: Fiction and Facts’, in Joseph S. Perkell and Dennis H. Klatt (eds.), Invariance and Variability in Speech Processes (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986), pp. 480–8. Part 3: Explorations and Assessments of Jakobson’s Work on Sound Structure 45. Martin Atkinson, ‘Jakobson’s Theory of Phonological Development’, Explanations in the Study of Child Language Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 27–37. 46. Olga K. Garnica, ‘The Development of Phonemic Speech Perception’, in

Edited and with a new introduction by Margaret Thomas, Professor of Linguistics in the Slavic and Eastern Languages and Literatures Department of Boston College, USA