Contributions of Roman Jakobson

Abstract

ions imposed on the data or of signs standing for something else; they are real, concrete relations. [Some descriptive linguists in America did not heartily embrace Jakobson's binary notions of sound structure. Martin Joos (I50) argued that polar opposition is no more than a metaphor that Jakobson imported from poetics. In a way this was an astute observation, as we shall see, but not in itself a convincing argument for abandoning the metaphor. ] Instead of defining features solely according to their manner and place of articulation (d), one can also define them acoustically (138), because the act of communication, as Saussure had already pointed out, involves a speaker and a hearer, an encoder and a decoder of sound-meaning. This acoustic-articulatory definition of features permits us to formulate the opposition between, say, the English stop consonants in a uniform way. The labials (p, b) are lower pitched than the dentals (t, d); correlatively, the velars (k, g) are lower pitched than the palatals (c, j). Higher pitch (acute) tid c/j Lower pitch (grave) plb k/g In addition, the acute stop consonants can be internally differentiated by yet another acoustic feature, compact vs diffuse (noncompact). This feature (±compact) may be roughly described as follows. Some sounds have their bands of energy concentrated in approximately the middle and lower range of the speech-sound spectrum (compact), whereas other sounds have their bands of energy widely separated and dispersed at the upper end of the spectrum (diffuse). The velars and palatals are compact, the labials and dentals are diffuse. Finally, we also have to be able to distinguish between two sets of compact phonemes, c: k: :j: g. Note that the palatals are released with more friction, which shows up as a noise pattern in the sound spectragraph. Therefore, we can add another feature (± strident) to our system. Let us stop the analysis at this point, even though we have obviously not completely described the English consonant phonemes in terms of their constituent