"Reading this volume transported me back to Harvard and MIT lecture halls of the 1960s, where weekly Roman Jakobson would spellbind his audience (this reviewer included), developing his vision of language through impassioned exposition, deft and devastating allusions to critical literature, anecdotes with the force of parables, metaphors of mythic imagery, and above all else overriding verbal artistry: truly in his own phrase, 'In the poetry of grammar'. The Sound Shape of Language, his collaboration with Linda R. Waugh, a scholar who has devoted considerable attention to an exposition and elaboration of Jakobsonian views, fortunately has preserved in print the authoritative lectorial voice." Michael Silverstein in Journal of Communication

"Jakobson and Halle's initial statement of the principles of linguistic organization should be made available to all future generations of linguists. It builds a solid foundation for Saussurean thinking about linguisic oppositions and establishes distinctive feature theory as the basis of their formal treatment." Prof. Dr. William Labov, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Linguistics

This volume consists of two studies. The first is a joint essay presenting a critical survey of the author's views on phonology, a theory of sound patterns, and their stratification. The second is an individual contribution from Roman Jakobson ranging widely over many problems of language and its disturbances, literature and general symbolic behaviour.

First published in Great Britain in 1973, Main Trends in the Science of Language was part of a series of books that resulted from a study carried out by UNESCO in collaboration with national and international research centres in the social sciences, as well as with groups of individual scholars. The book examines the position of linguistics in the years surrounding the publication of the book before considering the subject's potential, future development. It looks at linguistic vistas, the place of linguistics among the sciences of man and linguistics and natural sciences. This book will be of interest to the educated reader, research workers, and professional associations as well as to national and international institutions that organize, plan and finance scientific research.

"Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time " was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Roman Jakobson, one of the most important thinkers of our century, was bet known for his role in the rise and spread of the structural approach to linguistics and literature. His formative structuralism approach to linguistics and literature. His formative years with the Russian Futurists and subsequent involvement in the Moscow and Prague Linguistic Circles (which he co-founded) resulted in a lifelong devotion to fundamental change in both literary theory and linguistics. In bringing each to bear upon the other, he enlivened both disciplines; if a literary work was to a him a linguistic fact, it was also a semiotic phenomenon - part of the entire universe of signs; and above all, for both language and literature, time was an integral factor, one that produced momentum and change. Jakobson's books and articles, written in many languages and published around the world, were collected in a monumental seven-volume work, "Selected Writings "(1962 -1984), which has been available only to a limited readership. Not long before his death in 1982, Jakobson brought together this group of eleven essays--"Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time " -- to serve as an introduction to some of his linguistic theories and especially, to his work in poetics.

Jakobson's introductory article and the editor's preface together suggest the range of his work and provide a context for the essays in this book, which fall into three groups. Those in the first section reflect his preoccupation with the dynamic role of time in language and society. Jakobson challenges Saussure's rigid distinction between language as a static (synchronic) system and its historical (diachronic) development - a false opposition, in his view, since it ignores the role of time in the present moment of language. The essays on time counter the notion that structuralism itself, as heir to Saussure's work, has discarded history; in Jakabson's hands, we see a struggle to integrate the two modes. In central group essays, on poetic theory, he shows how the grammatical categories of everyday speech become the expressive, highly charged language of poetry. These essays also deal with the related issues of subliminal and intentional linguistic patterns of poetry. These essays also deal with the related issues of subliminal and intentional linguistic patterns in poetry--areas that are problematic in structural analysis--and provide exemplary readings of Pushkin and Yeats. The last essays, on Mayakovsky and Holderlin, make clear that Jakobson was aware of the essential (and in these instances, tragic) bond between a poet's life and art. The book closes with essays by Linda Waugh, Krystyna Pomorska, and Igor Melchuk that provide a thoughtful perspective on Jakobson's work as a whole.

This work attempts to describes the ultimate discrete components of language, their specific structure, and their articulatory, acoustic, and perceptual correlates, and surveys their utilization in the language of the world. First published in 1951, this edition contains an added paper on Tenseness and Laxness.