Roman Jakobson, "Selections"

[Jakobson (1896 - 1982) was a founder-member of the Moscow Linguistic Circle; in

1920 he moved to Czechoslovakia and helped found the Prague Linguistic Circle,
the source of foundational work in Structuralist Linguistics and Poetics. He mov
ed to the U.S., where he lived and taught {usual East-coast ivy-ish suspects} un
til his death.
The first selection is from "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Disturbanc
es," published in 1956. The second selection is from Style in Language (1960; fi
rst delivered at a conference in 1958. Because the second piece is very, very lo
ng, I've made many cuts -- I hope you'll still get the idea of his argument and
method {and I would be happy to lend a more complete version to anyone who wishe
s to read it}. Both selections are transcribed from the Jakobson pieces in the D
avid Lodge anthology, cited in some previous ER readings; the page range for the
Jakobson stuff is 32 - 61.]
"The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles"
1. The varieties of aphasia [severe language disorder] are numerous and
diverse, but all of them lie between the two polar types just described. Every f
orm of aphasic disturbance consists in some impairment, more or less severe, eit
her of the faculty for selection and substitution or for combination and context
ure. The former affliction involves a deterioration of metalinguistic operations
, while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the hierarchy of linguis
tic units. The relation of similarity is suppressed in the former, the relation
of contiguity in the latter type of aphasia. Metaphor is alien to the similarity
disorder, and metonymy to the contiguity disorder.
2. The development of a discourse may take place along two different sem
antic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or th
rough their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term fo
r the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their mos
t condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. In aphasia one or
the other of these two processes is restricted or totally blocked -- an effect w
hich makes the study of aphasia particularly illuminating for the linguist. In n
ormal verbal behavior both processes are continually operative, but careful obse
rvation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality,
and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over the othe
r. [Jakobson here describes some word-association experiments that bear out his
assertions . . .]
3. In verbal art the interaction of these two elements is especially pro
nounced. Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in vers
e patterns which require a compulsory parallelism between adjacent lines, for ex
ample in Biblical poetry or in the Finnic and, to some extent, the Russian oral
tradition. This provides an objective criterion of what in the given speech comm
unity acts as a correspondence. Since on any verbal level -- morphemic, lexical,
syntactic, and phraseological -- either of these two relations (similarity and
contiguity) can appear -- and each in either of two aspects [substitutive and pr
edicative], an impressive range of possible configurations is created. Either of
the two gravitational poles may prevail. In Russian lyrical songs, for example,
metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic w
ay is preponderant.
4. In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice betwee
n these alternants. The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary school
s of romanticism and symbolism has been repeatedly acknowledged, but it is still
insufficiently realized that it is the predominance of metonymy which underlies
and actually predetermines the so-called "realistic" trend, which belongs to an
intermediary stage between the decline of romanticism and the rise of symbolism

and is opposed to both. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the rea
list author metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the
characters to the setting in space and time. He is fond of synecdochic details.
In the scene of Anna Karenina's suicide Tolstoy's artistic attention is focused
on the heroine's handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches 'hair on the upp
er lip' and 'bare shoulders' are used by the same writer to stand for the female
characters to whom these features belong.
5. The alternative predominance of one or the other of these two process
es is by no means confined to verbal art. The same oscillation occurs in sign sy
stems other than language. A salient example from the history of painting is the
manifestly metonymical orientation of cubism, where the object is transformed i
nto a set of synecdoches; the surrealist painters responded with a patently meta
phorical attitude. Ever since the productions of D. W. Griffith, the art of the
cinema, with its highly developed capacity for changing the angle, perspective,
and focus of 'shots,' has broken with the tradition of the theater and ranged an
unprecedented variety of synecdochic 'close-ups' and metonymic 'set-ups' in gen
eral. In such motion pictures as those of Charlie Chaplin and [the Russian film
pioneer Sergei] Eisenstein, these devices in turn were overlayed by a novel, met
aphoric 'montage' with its 'lap dissolves' -- the filmic similes.
6. [More on aphasia, and examples from Russian folktales, which to me do
n't do real well in translation.]
7. The Russian novelist Gleb Ivanovic Uspenskij (1840 - 1902) in the las
t years of his life suffered from a mental illness involving a speech disorder.
His first name and patronymic, Gleb Ivanovic, traditionally combined in polite i
ntercourse, for him split into two distinct names designating two separate being
s: Gleb was endowed with all his virtues, while Ivanovic, the name relating a so
n to his father, became the incarnation of all Uspenskij's vices. The linguistic
aspect of this split personality is the patient's inability to use two symbols
for the same thing, and it is thus a similarity disorder. Since the similarity d
isorder is bound up with the metonymical bent, an examination of the literary ma
nner Uspenskij had employed as a young writer takes on particular interest. And
the study of Anatolij Kamegulov, who analyzed Uspenskij's style, bears out our t
heoretical expectations. He shows that Uspenskij had a particular penchant for m
etonymy, and especially for synecdoche, and that he carried it so far that "the
reader is crushed by the multiplicity of detail unloaded on him in a limited ver
bal space, and is physically unable to grasp the whole, so that the portrait is
often lost" (Kamegulov 1930).
8. To be sure, the metonymical style in Uspenskij is obviously prompted
by the prevailing literary canon of his time, late nineteenth-century 'realism';
but the personal stamp of Gleb Ivanovic made his pen particularly suitable for
this artistic trend in its extreme manifestations and finally left its mark upon
the verbal aspect of his mental illness. [Jakobson next compares his own ideas
about language to Freud's about the 'dreamwork.']
9. Similarity in meaning connects the symbols of a metalanguage with the
symbols of the language referred to. Similarity connects a metaphorical term wi
th the term for which it is substituted. Consequently, when constructing a metal
anguage to interpret tropes, the researcher possesses more homogeneous means to
handle metaphor, whereas metonymy, based on a different principle, easily defies
interpretation. Therefore nothing comparable to the rich literature on metaphor
can be sited for the theory of metonymy. For the same reason, it is generally r
ealized that romanticism is closely linked with metaphor, whereas the equally in
timate ties of realism with metonymy usually remain unnoticed. Not only the tool
of the observer but also the object of observation is responsible for the prepo
nderance of metaphor over metonymy in scholarship. Since poetry is focused upon
the sign, and pragmatical prose primarily upon the referent, tropes and figures

were studied mainly as poetic devices. The principle of similarity underlies poe
try; the metrical parallelism of lines, or the phonic equivalence of rhyming wor
ds prompts the question of semantic similarity and contrast; there exist, for in
stance, grammatical and anti-grammatical but never agrammatical rhymes. Prose, o
n the contrary, is forwarded essentially by contiguity. Thus, for poetry, metaph
or, and for prose, metonymy is the line of least resistance and, consequently, t
he study of poetical tropes is directed chiefly toward metaphor. The actual bipo
larity has been artificially replaced in these studies by an amputated, unipolar
scheme which, strikingly enough, coincides with one of the two aphasic patterns
, namely with the contiguity disorder.
"Linguistics and Poetics"
10. I have been asked for summary remarks about poetics in relation to l
inguistics. Poetics deals primarily with the question, What makes a verbal messa
ge a work of art? Because the main subject of poetics is the differential specif
ica [specific differences] of verbal art in relation to other arts and in relati
on to other kinds of verbal behavior, poetics is entitles to the leading place i
n literary studies.
11. Poetics deals with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysi
s of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the gl
obal science of verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of
linguistics. [Etc., etc., etc. Jakobson claims that poetic devices belong to ot
her arts as well, such as cinema.] In short, many poetic features belong not onl
y to the science of language but to the whole theory of signs, that is, to gener
al semiotics. [. . .]
12. Likewise, a second objection contains nothing that would be specific
for literature: the question of relations between the word and the world concer
ns not only verbal art but actually all kinds of discourse. Linguistics is likel
y to explore all possible problems of relation between discourse and the 'univer
se of discourse': what of this universe is verbalized by a given discourse and h
ow is it verbalized. The truth values, however, as far as they are -- to say wit
h the logicians -- 'extra-linguistic entities,' obviously exceed the bounds of p
oetics and of linguistics in general.
13. [Jakobson continues, introducing the idea of 'synchronic poetics' to
complement Saussure's idea of 'synchronic linguistics.]
14. Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. B
efore discussing the poetic function we must define its place among the other fu
nctions of language. An outline of those functions demands a concise survey of t
he constitutive factors in any speech event, in any act of verbal communication.
The ADDRESSER [speaker, author] sends a MESSAGE [the verbal act, the signifier]
to the ADDRESSEE [the hearer or reader]. To be operative the message requires a
CONTEXT [a referent, the signified], seizable by the addresses, and either verb
al or capable of being verbalized; a CODE [shared mode of discourse, shared lang
uage] fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and the addressee (i
n other words, to the encoder and decoder of the message); and, finally, a CONTA
CT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the addresser and th
e addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication.
15. [Let me summarize the next part of Jakobson's argument. He claims th
at each of these six factors determines a different function of language. In bri
ef:
the REFERENTIAL function is oriented toward the CONTEXT
the EMOTIVE (expressive) function is oriented toward the ADDRESSER
the CONATIVE (action-inducing, such as a command) function is orient
ed toward the ADDRESSEE

 the METALINGUAL (language speaking about language) function is orien

ted toward the CODE
the POETIC function is oriented toward the MESSAGE for its own sake.
Jakobson mentions that these functions often coexist in the same aural o
r verbal text. But they are hierarchized. Poetry depends on the poetic function
{duh . . .} but lyric poetry is "intimately linked with the emotive function," e
pic poetry with the referential function, etc.]
16. What is the empirical linguistic criterion of the poetic function? I
n particular, what is the indispensable feature inherent in any piece of poetry?
To answer this question we must recall the two basic modes of arrangement used
in verbal behavior, selection and combination. If 'child' is the topic of the me
ssage, the speaker selects one among the extant, more or less similar, nouns lik
e child, kid, youngster, tot, all of them equivalent in a certain respect, and t
hen, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semantically cognate ver
bs -- sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in a speech chain. Th
e selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity
, synonymity and antonymity, while the combination, the build up of the sequence
, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivale
nce from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is prom
oted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equal
ized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equ
al word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long,
and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no
boundary; syntactic pause equals syntactic pause, no pause equals no pause. Syl
lables are converted into units of measure, and so are morae or stresses.
17. [This is just the beginning of how Jakobson analyses poetry -- or, p
erhaps, 'describes' poetry is a better way to put it. I'll give you a little tas
te, and then sign off on this selection.] Although rhyme by definition is based
on a regular recurrence of equivalent phonemes or phonemic groups, it would be a
n unsound oversimplification to treat rhyme merely from the standpoint of wound.
Rhyme necessarily involves the semantic relationship between rhyming units ('rh
yme fellows' in Hopkins' nomenclature). In the scrutiny of a rhyme we are faced
with the question of whether or not it is a homoeoteleuton, which confronts simi
lar derivational and/or inflexional suffixes (congratulations - decorations), or
whether the rhyming words belong to the same or to different categories. Thus,
for example, Hopkins' fourfold rhyme is an agreement of two nouns -- 'kind' and
'mind' -- both contrasting with the adjective 'blind' and with the verb 'find.'
Is there a semantic propinquity, a sort of simile between rhyming lexical units,
as in dove - love, light - bright, place - space, name - fame? Do the rhyming m
embers carry the same syntactic function? The difference between the morphologic
al class and the syntactic application may be pointed out in rhyme. Thus in Poe'
s lines, "While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of s
omeone gently rapping," the three rhyming words, morphologically alike, are all
three syntactically different. Are totally or partly homonymic rhymes prohibited
, tolerated, or favored? Such full homonyms as son - sun, I - eye, eve - eave, a
nd on the other hand, echo rhymes like December - ember, infinite - night, swarm
- warm, smiles - miles? What about compound rhymes (such as Hopkins' enjoyment
- toy meant' or 'began some - ransom'), where a word unit accords with a word gr
oup?
18. [I'll leave you with that question and end this selection.]