Jakobson, Roman (rəmän` yäk`ôbsən), 1896–1982, Russian-American linguist and literary critic, b. Moscow. He coined the term structural linguistics and stressed that the aim of historical linguistics is the study not of isolated changes within a language but of systematic change. In Czechoslovakia in the late 1920s and the 30s, Jakobson and a few colleagues, most notably N. S. Trubetzkoy, developed what came to be known as the Prague school of linguistics. They argued that synchronic phonology, the study of speech sounds in a language at a given time, must be considered in light of diachronic phonology, the study of speech sounds as they have changed over the course of the language's history. After leaving Czechoslovakia in 1939, Jakobson went on to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden before coming to the United States to teach at Columbia Univ. (1943–49) and later Harvard (1949–67); at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1957–67) he worked with Morris Halle on distinctive-feature theory, developing a binary system that defines a speech sound by the presence or absence of specific phonetic qualities, such as stridency and nasality. Through his contact with French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss Lévi-Strauss, Claude (klōd lā`vē-strous), 1908–, French anthropologist, b. Brussels, Belgium.
..... Click the link for more information. and others, Jakobson was influential in the development of structuralism structuralism, theory that uses culturally interconnected signs to reconstruct systems of relationships rather than studying isolated, material things in themselves. This method found wide use from the early 20th cent.
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Bibliography

See his Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning (1978); Framework of Language (1980).

Jakobson, Roman (Osipovich)

(born Oct. 11, 1896, Moscow, Russia—died July 18, 1982, Boston, Mass., U.S.) Russian-born U.S. linguist. Born and educated in Moscow, Jakobson moved to Prague in 1920; the European political situation forced him to flee to Scandinavia in 1938 and to the U.S. in 1941. He taught at Harvard University (1949–67). His interests ranged from folk epics and the cultural history of the Slavs to general phonology, the morphology of the Slavic languages, and speech acquisition. His preoccupation with contrast and opposition is reflected in his analysis of the Russian case system (1938), a brilliant analysis of the Russian verbal system (1948), and preeminently in his work on distinctive features in phonology.