Jakobson

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Roman Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist known for his work on language functions and structuralism
2. The name belongs to Roman Jakobson, a influential linguist and literary scholar who shaped modern structural linguistics and poetics
3. Refers to the Russian-American thinker Roman Jakobson, a pioneering figure in linguistics whose theories of communication remain widely studied

Etymology: Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) was a Russian-born linguist whose surname now names a scheme of language functions, a phonological theory, and a particular kind of linguistic analysis. "Jakobson" is simply his family name, a Russian patronymic-style surname from the Jewish Jakobson family of Moscow, so the word as an English term is a proper noun borrowed directly from a person rather than built from a root. Its earliest use in English as a name of a scholar would fall in the mid-20th century, when his work on phonology and his émigré career in Prague, Scandinavia and the United States made him well known to Anglophone linguists. The term's most common afterlife is in the adjective "Jakobsonian" and in the phrase "Jakobson's six functions of language," a model he set out in 1960 describing the referential, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual and poetic purposes of speech. Many students meet his name only through that diagram, which is why the surname has become a shorthand for a way of thinking about communication.