Roman Jakobson Quotations

Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve.

The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features.

Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification.

At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features.

Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.

Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession.

Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding.

Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.