Roman Jakobson

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.