Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson was a Russian-born linguist whose career spanned Moscow, Prague, Scandinavia and the United States, and whose work did more than any other single figure's to carry structuralist method from Saussure's Geneva into twentieth-century phonology, poetics and communication theory. A founding member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, he helped develop distinctive feature theory, the analysis of speech sounds as bundles of binary phonetic contrasts, and proposed an influential model of the functions of language keyed to the elements of any communicative act. His later work on poetics argued that the same structural methods illuminating grammar could describe what makes poetic language distinctive.