Roman Jakobson and the phonetics-phonology dichotomy

Abstract

If one is to mention the one scholar who over the second half of this century has had the greatest impact on the way we talk about the relationship between phonetics and phonology, there is no doubt that the name is Roman Jakobson. His name in the context of phonology is, above all, coupled to the theory of distinctive features, but his linguistic thinking is even more strongly tied with the general dichotomy of invariance versus variation. I shall deal to some extent with both issues in this paper, but I wish to emphasize from the start that this is not a biographically or bibliographically balanced account of Jakobson's achievements. It is just an essay in which I look from an outsider's perspective at some live issues in phonetics and phonology for which Jakobson's thinking has been highly significant. I discuss these issues from the point of view of present challenges, rather than in the context of Jakobson's own linguistic milieu. It is the heritage and its importance for linguistics and phonetics today, rather than the history of science, that I am commenting on. In doing that, I may fail to do justice to Jakobson's views and achievements.