# Fame.am profile — machine-readable export
# Canonical URL: https://fame.am/person/roman-jakobson
# Generated: 2026-09-07T19:26:42.435Z

schema: https://schema.org/Person
url: "https://fame.am/person/roman-jakobson"
name: "Roman Jakobson"
slug: "roman-jakobson"
description: "He gave linguistics the architecture it still uses — a toolkit for breaking language into binary sound features, then applying that logic to grammar, meaning, even poetry and film. His structuralist methods rippled out through Lévi-Strauss and Barthes into anthropology and literary theory, and his early influence on Chomsky seeded the next half-century of th"
tagline: "Russian linguist (1896–1982)"
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gender: "male"
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  entityType: "https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q39631"
birthDate: "1896-09-28"
deathDate: "1982-07-18"
livingStatus: "DECEASED"
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# bio (long form, separated for readability)
bio: |
  Born Roman Iosel-Berovich Yakobson on 28 September 1896 in Russia, he worked with Nikolai Trubetzkoy to invent phonology as a modern discipline, building revolutionary techniques for analysing sound systems. He extended those principles to syntax, morphology, and semantics, then borrowed from C. S. Peirce's semiotics, communication theory, and cybernetics to devise methods for studying poetry, music, and visual arts including cinema. His two studies of Russian case and his analysis of the Russian verb became landmarks in Slavic linguistics. Through his influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, the structuralist approach he advanced from Ferdinand de Saussure became a dominant postwar intellectual movement across Europe and the United States. His theory of distinctive features shaped the early thought of Noam Chomsky, and though structuralism faded in the 1970s, his work continued to anchor linguistic anthropology through Dell Hymes's ethnography of communication and Michael Silverstein's semiotics of culture. He died 18 July 1982.