Romance Jacobson s Linguistic Theory of Translation 15

A well-known Russian linguist, who emigrated to the Slovak Republic and the United States, he was the leader of the Moscow linguistic circles and the founder of the Prague School, and was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century for his contributions to linguistics, literary theory, structural linguistic anthropology, and semiotics. Three of his insights in linguistics still play an important role today.

Roman Jacobsen (1896-1982) was a veteran of the Prague School and a pioneer of structuralism. He was Jewish, born in Russia; He studied at Moscow State University in his early years and graduated in 1918 with a master's degree. During his studies, he participated in the creation of the Moscow Linguistics Group.

In 1920, at the age of 24, Jacobson became a professor at the Higher Drama Academy in Moscow. He emigrated to the Czech Republic in 1921 and went into exile as a Jew in 1941 in the United States, where he taught at Columbia University (1943-1949) and then at Harvard University (1949-1967). During his lifetime, he was an academician of 9 academies of science, received 25 honorary doctorates, and published more than 500 books.

Jacobson's linguistic research covers a wide range of topics, from the most "specialized" phonemic theories to the most "general" poetic discourses, among which the most meaningful and enlightening one for communication studies is the idea of the dichotomy between metaphor and metonymy. This idea can be traced back to Saussure's view of the dichotomy between horizontal and vertical combinations, that is, the activity of the language system is carried out on two axes; The first is the horizontal segment (chain) relationship.

Roman Jacobson, both a linguist and a poetry critic, uses his extensive knowledge of linguistics to connect structuralist linguistics with poetry criticism, starting from the linguistic form of poetry, revealing the mystery of "why poetic texts are poetry", and establishing a linguistic poetic criticism method.

Jacobson linked linguistics and poetry early on, and his formalist theories of poetry were very insightful, such as "poetry reveals its own linguistic means" and "poetry is a word in itself". However, Jacobson's main contribution to the practice of poetry criticism is to isolate a "poetic function" from the comparative study of the overall communicative function of language, and to give a thorough linguistic analysis of the formation process of this function, so as to theoretically explain why poetic language is different from other languages. This explanation is groundbreaking, revealing the internal mechanism of the formation of "poetic language as poetic language".

His main works include "Meaningless Books", "Futurism", "On Czech Poetry", "Linguistics and Poetics", and "Topics in Literature and Linguistics" (co-authored with Tynyanov).