Roman was born in Moscow on October 11, 1896. He emigrated to the Czech Republic and the United States. In both areas of living, he was a leading figure of the Moscow Minguistic Circle, one of the two movements constituting Russian Formalism. Jakobson was also a founder of the Prague School of Linguistic Theory. He had broad interests spanning fields such as phonology, philology, Slavic literature and folklore, general linguistics, aesthetics, comparative mythology, avant-garde painting, poetry, and comparative metrics. As shown, Roman had a huge impact on many areas of study over time. There were also many areas of study that included social anthropology and psychoanalysis.
His first area of work that was recorded was the Moscow Minguistic Circle in 1915 and the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926. In 1941, Roman decided to move to the United States. From 1942 to 1949, he taught at Ecole Research in New York. There he met Claude Levi Strauss, whose work had a large influence on his own. Afterwards, he worked at the Columbia University, Harvard, and M.I.T.
Jakobson's three major ideas in linguistics played a major role in the field to this day. Linguistic typology, markedness, and linguistic universals are all tightly tied together. Typology is the classification of languages in terms of shared grammatical features (as opposed to shared origin). Markedness is a study of how certain forms of grammatical organization are more natural that others. Last but not least, linguistic universals are the study of the general features of language in the world.
It is hard to sum up Roman Jakobson’s work in just a few words as he studied many areas and worked with wide variety of people throughout many years of his work. There have been books written about Roman’s achievements, including Roman Jakobson: Echoes of His Scholarship, written by Armstrong and Schooneveld. His work is still used today in many areas. Roman Jakobson's life came to an end on July 18, 1982 in Boston, Massachusetts, when he was 86 years old.
References:
Issacharoff, Michael. "Roman Jakobson." The Johns Hopkins University Press.1997.
http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_library_theory/roman_jakobson.html
"Jakobson, Roman." 14 April, 2004. http://www.heartfield.demon.co.uk.jakobson.htm
"Jakobson, Roman." Encyclopedia Britticanna. 14 April, 2004. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article
"Jakobson, Roman." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 14 April, 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/roman_jakobson
Written by: Amber Visness