PRAGUE SCHOOL:

ROMAN JAKOBSON
(1896–1982)
• Roman Jakobson, the Moscow-born linguist
and semiotician who carried out most of his
work in the United States, is perhaps best
known for his model of communication
(Jakobson, 1960) – a model that is based on
a social-dynamic theory of the sign.
• A student of Russian linguist Nikolai
Trubetzkoy (1890–1939), Jakobson was a
founding member of the Prague Linguistic
Circle in 1920.
• Under the functional viewpoint, language was found
to be of a teleonomic nature, i.e., to constitute a
means–ends, or goal oriented, system as a tool
serving a certain function and adapted to its
requirements, i.e., to the needs of human
communication.
• Enriching K. Bu¨hler’s approach, Jakobson (1960)
distinguished six functions of language (and/or
discourse), according to whether attention is
primarily paid to relationships of an utterance to the
context (referential function), to the speaker
(emotive), to the message (poetic), to the addressee,
to the communicative contact, or to the code.
Jakobson then pointed out that each of
these constituents determines a
different communicative function:
1. Emotive. This is the intent of the
addresser in the communication act, or
the expression of attitude via the
message.
2. Conative. This is the effect the
message has (or is intended to have)
on its receiver.
3. Referential. This is any message
that is constructed to convey
information (‘Main Street is two
blocks north of here’).
4. Poetic. This is any message
constructed to deliver meanings
effectively, like poetry (‘I like Ike’).
5. Phatic. This any message
designed to establish,
acknowledge, or reinforce social
relations (‘Hi, how’s it going?’).
6. Metalingual. This is any message
that refers to the code used (‘The
word noun is a noun’).
Roman Jakobson
Model of
Communication
THEORY OF THE SIGN
Roman Jakobson
• Jakobson’s model suggests that sign use
goes well beyond the function of simple
information transfer.
• Signs are shifters that determine who
says what to whom, where and when it is
said, and how and why it is said; that is,
sign use is motivated and shaped by the
setting, the message contents, the
participants, and the goals of each
interlocutor.
• Jakobson argued that the Saussurean view of
the sign as an arbitrary structure – that is, one
that has no motivation for being as it is
through resemblance or simulation to its
referent – was ultimately a useless one.
• Taking his cue from Otto Jespersen (1860–
1943), Jakobson saw signs as ‘shifters’ pointing
to the cause and context of an utterance.
• Shifters are indicators of place (here, there),
time (now, then), and specificity (this, that)
that are context-sensitive.
 The notion of shifter led to his model of
communication, which has become
widely used in both semiotics and
linguistics. This consists of six
constituents:
1. An addresser who initiates a
communication;
2. A message that he or she wishes to
convey and which he or she recognizes
must refer to something other than itself;
3. An addressee who is the intended
receiver of the message;
4. A context that provides the framework
for encoding and decoding the message
– e.g., the phrase ‘Help me’ takes on a
different meaning depending on
whether it is uttered by someone lying
motionless on the ground or by
someone in a classroom who is working
on a difficult math problem;
5. A mode of contact (face-to-face,
phone, etc.) by which the
message is delivered between an
addresser and an addressee;
6. A code (such as language,
gesture, etc.) providing the signs
for encoding and decoding
messages.
• Functionalism was soon effectively applied on
the two sides of the system of language
concerning its minimal and maximal units,
namely, handling both the nature of their
sound patterns and the sentence structure in
its relationships to communication.
• On the one hand, phonemics or phonology
was created by Trubetzkoy (1939) and
Jakobson as a new theory that regarded the
sound patterns of languages as specific
subsystems analyzed from the functional
angle.