·

·

(Re)considering Roman Jakobson

[Jakobsonia]

Note that all of my own citations of Jakobson's Selected Writings follow the bibliographical system that can be checked online or in Stephen Rudy's Roman Jakobson 1896-1982: A Complete Bibliography of His Writings (Google Books). I have omitted the publication dates of the volumes of SW as they crowd the discussion unneccessarily with numbers, not to mention that their publication dates are a bit confusing (some later volumes were published at an earlier date than earlier ones), and some have been reprinted, published online, etc. with varying dates. When looking up citations to Jakobson check the online resource or published bibliography and take into consideration that I'm referring to their republications or English translations in Selected Writings only, and not the original places of publication and languages. The reader may also benefit from the knowledge that Selected Writings is sold on De Gruyter's webpage and every chapter has a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) code, e.g. 10.1515/9783110802122.18 for "Linguistics and Poetics" (Jakobson 1960d). Anyone with even minimal experience in academia should already know where to enter the DOI.

Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi 2021. Foreword: Roman Jakobson in the twenty-first century. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 7-14.

The project began in the fall of 2014, when the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu (in Estonia) held a graduate course devoted entirely to the study of Jakobson's works as published in English. The thrust of the course was to mine Jakobson's works in order to find relevant issues for semiotics. The series of seminars was conducted by Elin Sütiste, who further initiated this editorial project as an extrapolation of the course's collective research. The embryo of this work is therefore the result of those seminars and their notable atmosphere of intellectual dialogue and sparks of enthusiasm. (Sütiste et al. 2021: 7)

Indeed, it was one of my all-time favourite courses I've ever taken. Some of my fondest memories is having the free time to read Jakobson, so that I didn't have to select a text but could read all that were offered. Personally, I'm still mining his works, and have at least one more paper on Jakobson in me.

These seminars affirmed that Jakobson was truly an ambitious, forward-thinking scholar who exerted himself to establish semiotics as a discipline. Though Jakobson identified himself as a philologist, he played a pivotal role in the development and institutionalization of semiotics. Indeed, Umberto Eco has characterized Jakobson as "the major 'catalyst' in the contemporary 'semiotic reaction'" (Eco 1987: 111). (Sütiste et al. 2021: 7)

Reference to "The influence of Roman Jakobson on the development of semiotics" (Eco 1987).

Jakobson's synthesizing mind integrated the cutting-edge results of various disciplines, from cybernetics to communication theory, and this type of interdisciplinary synthesis was instrumental in the birth of contemporary semiotics. Simultaneously, Jakobson delved into semiotics in its historical dimension, drawing attention to figures whose relevance had been mostly neglected, such as Johann Heinrich Lambert, Bernard Bolzano, and of course Charles Sanders Peirce. (Sütiste et al. 2021: 8)

Lambert appears to be wholly untranslated. Bolzano's ethical and political writings have been translated. With Peirce, Jakobson's claim to achievement here is introducing him to the linguistic world. Jakobson no doubt synthesized, but since he did so from sources in numerous languages ("unfortunately, all of them Russian" per Sebeok 1991: 142), it is a near-impossible task to have certainty as to what they were.

It is partly due to Jakobson's efforts that we have seen a rediscovery and a resurgence of Peirce's writings in the first place, and clearly this greater access to Peirce has had a major impact upon contemporary semiotic thought. It is difficult to imagine semiotics in its current form without Peirce and his impact upon influential scholars such as Thomas Sebeok and John Deely. In that way, Jakobson's efforts had far-reaching effects. In fact, understanding Peirce's work is itself key to understanding Jakobson's work, for Jakobson was heavily shaped by Peirce's semiotic thought in certain fundamental respects. Jakobson derived much of his concept of meaning [|] and his sign typology from Peirce. In particular, the icon/index/symbol triad appears in Jakobson frequently, with Jakobson actually building upon Peirce's system by adding a fourth modality (artifice). These are concepts that shape the framework of semiotic thought itself, which means that Jakobson's Peircean influence exists at a foundational level. (Sütiste et al. 2021: 8-9)

I stand corrected, Jakobson himself considered himself "among linguists perhaps the sole student of Peirce's views" (1977e: 250). "For further reading on the connection between Jakobson and Peirce [...]" (ibid, 8; fn 3) the editors give the following:

  • Andrews, Edna 1990. A dialogue on the sign: Can Peirce and Jakobson be reconciled? Semiotica 82(1/2): 1-13. [JJA]
  • Bruss, Elizabeth W. 1978. Peirce and Jakobson on the nature of the sign. In: Semiotics Around the World. (Bayley, Richard W.; Matejka, Ladislav; Steiner, Peter, eds.) Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 81-98.
  • Liszka, Jakób 1981. Peirce and Jakobson: Towards a structuralist reconstruction of Peirce. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 17(1): 41-61. [JJA]
  • Portis-Winner, Irene 1996. Jakobson's world: His dialogue with Peirce. Implications for American ethnology. Litteraria Humanitatis IV: 29-40.
  • Shapiro, Michael 1998. A few remarks on Jakobson as a student of Peirce. In: The Peirce Seminar Papers: Essays in Semiotic Analysis. Vol 3. The Jakobson Centenary Volume. (Shapiro, Michael, ed.) New York: Peter Lang, 1-10.
  • Short, Thomas L. 1998. Jakobson's problematic appropriation of Peirce. In: The Peirce Seminar Papers: Essays in Semiotic Analysis. Vol 3. The Jakobson Centenary Volume (Shapiro, Michael, ed.) New York: Peter Lang, 89-123.
Gramigna notes that Jakobson's proposals are sometimes inconsistent, due to such idiosyncrasies as his reducing Peirce's indivisible triads to dyadic relations and his avoidance of laying out his classification of signs in a systematic fashion. Gramigna himself, then, attempts to synthesize Jakobson's position into a coherent sign classification. (Sütiste et al. 2021: 9)

This is fairly typical, and probably a consequence of Jakobson having written so many papers and barely any full length books. A lot of his papers, in turn, repeat certain themes with slight variations (probably exacerbated by reliance on various translators).

According to Gvoždiak, Jakobson's interest here can be divided into two main areas or conceptions - the communicative metalanguage and the scientific metalanguage. The first conception is that metalanguage happens without any specific awareness on our part; it is an "everyday practice of communication" that happens automatically and thus is not restricted to "the science of logic or scientific semantics". The second conception is precisely that of the scientific role of metalanguage, especially as it concerns linguistics as a form of scientific inquiry; this should be understood in connection to logic and the work of people like Alfred Tarski and Rudolf Carnap. (Sütiste et al. 2021: 9)

A somewhat similar distinction I've constructed on the basis of how much the use of "metacommunication" in the Tartu-Moscow School differs from the metacommunication postulated by Ruesch and Bateson. My distinction is between diachronic and synchronic metacommunication. Diachronic is the "scientific" or "technical" (Jakobson has at least once used this designation) form of metacommunication, and is, simply put, chronologically separate from the "object" form of communication; "synchronic" metacommunication is Ruesch and Bateson's version, and pertains to instances in which there is a simultaneous communication of reinforcing or conflicting information through different channels; the prime example here is a schizophrenic mother uttering "I love you" to her child, while at the sime time pinching the child's cheek so hard that it bruises. Simply put, doing one thing and saying another, in which case either message can "say something" about the other.

Gvoždiak points out that Jakobson's approach here is "more of a promotional gesture" than a fully developed project - but that this [|] gesture forms a central part of Jakobson's semiotic theory and can be seen as akin to a working hypothesis that might reveal something significant about Jakobson's fundamental semiotics. (Sütiste et al. 2021: 9-10)

Exactly how I feel about his Permanent Dynamic Synchrony. It is simultaneously very central to his whole outlook, and manifested so diffusely that you can find a few pages or paragraphs pertaining to it in any given paper of his. The phrase "promotional gesture", too, is spot on. It is indeed a frequent case that he writes about what others have found out, his own way of thinking you have to as-if guess, deduce or read between the lines from numerous similar instances to come to some kind of conclusion, and nowhere is it final.

During the time when the present volume was in the making, a more general revival of interest towards Jakobson seems to have taken place. In fact, already in 2012, an international conference took place in Olomouc, Czech Republic, dedicated to shedding new light on Jakobson as an extraordinary scientific personality, important not only for modern Czech literary science and linguistics, but also for having contributed to the establishment of several new fields of science, such as phonology, communication theory, cognitive linguistics, and semiotics (Kubíček, Lass 2014a: 5). The conference was followed by a volume titled Roman O. Jakobson: A Work in Progress (Kubíček, Lass 2014b). (Sütiste et al. 2021: 12)

That is my impression as well, though very subjective - ever since that course and amassing so many quotes from Jakobson in this here blog, I've been contacted by several researchers who work in the "Jakobsonian" tradition, if it can be called so, and had some very informative exchanges. In my own specific corner of the Jakobsonian realm, revolving around the phatic function, he has naturally become more common due to the increase in the sheer amount of works that employ his scheme of linguistic functions. Roman O. Jakobson: A Work in Progress is available online (not sure if legally).

Waugh, Linda R. 2021. Roman Jakobson's work on semiotics and language. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 15-32.

Many scholars have made connections between work on language (in such fields as linguistics, literary studies, anthropology, psychology, and sociology) and work in the general field of semiotics. But Roman Jakobson, one of the major linguists, literary theorists (poeticians), and semioticians of the 20th century, had a thoroughly semiotic perspective in linguistics and literary theory. (Waugh 2021: 15)

In other words, semiotics wasn't simply something Jakobson dabbled with, an afterthought or a passing, cursory thing. Semiotics was "baked into" his whole outlook - considering his early acquaintance with de Saussure's theories - pretty nearly from the very beginning of his intellectual career.

Jakobson defined language as a structured system of signs. He argued, against the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, that since language is an interpersonal (intersubjective) means of communication, langue and parole (code and message in "modern, less ambiguous terminology" (Jakobson 1971k: 718) are mutually dependent and thus functionally and structurally linked, as for any semiotic system. (Waugh 2021: 16)

What is the connection between code and message specifically? How are they mutually dependent?

Moreover, any state of a language presents a dynamic synchrony: changes in progress are manifested as stylistically or socially marked variants (subcodes) - for example, older vs. newer ways of speaking. In this way, he insisted on the inclusion of time (and space, in geographical and social dialects) as an element of synchronic structure (Jakobson, Pomorska 1983: 56-90). Thus, he declared that the Saussurean dichotomy of internal-external (conditions) on language structure is invalid: anything that is pertinent to semiotic structure is by definition internal. (Waugh 2021: 16)

Left off the qualification "permanent", though it is admittedly unnecessary. Reference to their Dialogues (Jakobson & Pomorska 1983). Sadly I have avoided Saussure so effectively, that I have no idea what this "internal-external" stuff pertains to.

The primordial properties of sound are the distinctive features, those minimal sound elements that serve to distinguish larger signs (e.g., words) [|] from each other (Jakobson, Fant, Halle 1952; Jakobson, Halle 1956). This means that distinctive features, phonemes, which are bundles of distinctive features), and syllables are signs, whose signatum is "(mere) otherness" of pure differentiation ("sense discrimination" Jakobson, Waugh 1979). They are pure "signs of signs", unlike all other types of signs, which have some content. (Waugh 2021: 16-17)

This is, in my experience, another one of those aspects that he alludes to throughout his work, reaching a mature statement in The Sound Shape of Language (Jakobson & Waugh 1979). The distinction between inherently meaningful and sense discriminative elements, from what I've gathered, can be traced back to Plato, at the very least (though I am as of yet unable to verify this because philosophical dialogues are tedious reading, aren't they? - Yes, of course.).

All linguistic signs are simultaneously wholes composed of parts and themselves parts included in larger wholes (Jakobson 1971f[1963]). Hierarchy, then, is the fundamental structural principle: language is a part-whole hierarchy of signs from the smallest signs, the distinctive features, through phonemes, and syllables (the purely differential signs), morphemes, words, phrases, clauses, sentences, to the largest signs, discourses and texts (the signs with content). Signs lower in the hierarchy are incorporated into the larger signs through two types of combination: simultaneous (e.g., distinctive features in the phoneme) and sequential (e.g., phonemes in the syllable). Up to the level of the word, signs are encoded as wholes and thus the combinations are prefabricated. Above the word level, specific rules of combination ("syntactic matrices") govern how phrases, clauses and sentences are formed. Discourses and texts arise from only very generalized and optional rules of combination and thus allow the most freedom to be creative. That is, there is an ascending scale of freedom in the ability of [|] speakers to create, and addressees to understand, new signs. In other words, many signs are codified as such, but others are only evidenced as messages. Semiotic creativity, then, is associated with semiotic structure. (Waugh 2021: 17-18)

Once again I can refer to a visualization of this hierachy in the Theses for the semiotic study of culture (Lotman et al. 2013[1973]: 67). The "semiotic freedom" aspect makes a lot of sense: there is very little liberty on the level of phonemes and syllables (Why are you mispronouncing that word? would be the reaction to freedoms taken on those levels), whereas on what Lotman et al. call "General intention of the text" there is absolute freedom - one can talk about anything.

In addition, he correlated invariance with contextual variation: any sign evidences variation as it enters into specific contexts. But contextual variants are not all equal, they are hierarchized: some are more basic, others more marginal. (Waugh 2021: 18)

A valuable insight in itself. I'd connect it with the following, from the introduction, summarizing Sütiste's paper: "Translation may not always bevisible, and indeed the concept often appears in Jakobson's writing under the guise of other terms (forming what Sütiste calls a "term cluster"), but it is nevertheless a fundamental and underlying component of communication itself" (Sütiste et al. 2021: 11). A related phenomenon plagues "phatic studies", where there is a lot of contextual variation in the application of the term. It might be a good idea to view them as is suggested here, as forming a hierarchy.

Moreover, by insisting that reference (to external reality) is linguistic since it is implicated in contextual variation (Jakobson 1973: 315ff), he helped pave the way for the integration of pragmatics as a fundamental part of linguistics. (Waugh 2021: 18)

Again, not seeing the precise connection between contextual variation and pragmatics. The citation deserves mention: Aspects of the Theories of Roman Jakobson (Ballaer, M. van, ed.) Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven: Fakulteit der Wijsbegeerte en Lettern. This book is apparently based on Jakobson's lectures but sadly not available in Estonian libraries nor online.

While distinctive features are the most fundamental properties of sound, the speech sound is actually a complex sign made up of a variety of signs, each with its own particular function. Speech sounds as a whole are defined by a variety of feature types: distinctive features differentiate between words that are different in meaning (see Jakobson 1968a[1966]; Jakobson, Waugh 1979: 29ff, Waugh 1987), whereas redundant features are relevant for perception because they serve to support and enhance the distinctive features (Jakobson, Fant, Halle 1952; Jakobson, Waugh 1979: 39-41). Configurative features show the unity or the boundaries of meaningful units like words and phrases; expressive/stylistic features inform about the placement of vocabulary items in a special subset of the lexicon and/or about the subjective attitude of the speaker; physiognomic features inform about the age, sex, geographical and ethnic origin, social class, education, kinesthetic type, personality, and so forth of the speaker (Jakobson, Waugh 1979; Waugh 1987). All of these feature types together represent the entire makeup of a sound (its "shape"). (Waugh 2021: 19)

Awesome! Each speect sound has "its own particular function". Now it is only a question of bridging the gap between these features and their respective functions by realizing that these "functions" correspond to the ones in his famous scheme of linguistic functions in speech. This is by no means a simple task, as the analogies become as-if metaphorical. The "configurative features", for example, can be connected with the phatic function - they mark not only the boundaries of words and phrases but also turns, they indicate whether an utterance has ended or continues, and whether they call for a response from the interlocutor or concluding the exchange. Unifying features and functions is admittedly only hypothetical - doing so would require a very deep dive into his phonological writings, and may eventually conclude in a negative result, a nope.

For Jakobson, the raison d'etre for language, as for any semiotic system, is communication. While for many, the purpose of communication is referential, for Jakobson (and the Prague structuralists) "reference is not the only, nor even the primary, goal of communication" (Caton 1987: 231). Language is a system of systems suited to various communicative goals, which in turn are correlated with the act of communication in which language is used. (Waugh 2021: 20)

The words "for many" must be rhetorical. I have a gallery of people saying that the transmission of information is not the sole function of communication, whereas I can't think of anyone who holds that it is. Citation, again, looks exceedingly interesting (and is actually available online): Caton, Steven 1987. Contributions of Roman Jakobson. Annual Review of Anthropology 16: 223-260. [DOI: 10.2307/2155871].

In his famous article, Linguistics and Poetics, Jakobson defined six primary factors of any speech event (1981b[1960]: 21-22), based in part on Saussure (1916), Bühler (1934), and communication theory (see Shannon, Weaver 1949): (1) speaker, (2) addressee, (3) context (including the thing referred to, whether real or not, abstract or concrete), (4) message (parole), (5) code (langue), (6) contact (medium) of communication. In conjunction with these, he defined (Jakobson 1981b[1960]: 22-27; cf. 1985d[1976]: 113-115) the "functions of language" in terms of a focus (Einstellung) in the message on one of the factors: (1) emotive function (focus on the speaker) - e.g. intonation showing anger; (2) conative ("Appeal") function (focus on the addressee) - e.g., imperatives and vocatives; (3) referential function (focus on the context) - e.g., reference to an object near the speech event; (4) poetic function (focus on the message) - e.g., poetry; (5) metalingual (metalinguistic) function (focus on the code) - e.g., definition of a word; and (6) phatic function (focus on the contact) - e.g., "hello, do you hera me?". (Waugh 2021: 20)

Not sure what Saussure could have contributed aside from the parole/langue distinction, and whether there was anything "functional" about his treatment of them (again, I have avoided Saussure with impressive results of ignorance). The breakdown of context here is apt. The only thing that's missing, which I personally consider perhaps the most important aspect, is that "context" can also signify the literal meaning of the term: the surrounding text, i.e. what was previously said, and what one is going to say. As opposed to the "object near the speech event", which is, in Jakobson's terms, extra-linguistic, the so-called "object" one is referring to can also be another utterance, in which case it could be called, barring clumsiness, intra-linguistic. A near-at-hand illustration is provided by the one usually given to the metalingual function: if one asks another "What does that word mean?" the other person must understand what word in particular was not understood. Presumably the reference is normally included in such an inquiry, as in "What does 'bachelor' mean?" Another issue, which is really a non-issue in itself but could be interesting in itself, is the Einstellung ordeal. Regrettably, I am unable to find again a paper by a German author that went deep into the background of this word - with the result that his conclusion seemed to me, at the time, so incomprehensible that didn't read it in full and lost it. The most probable hint appears to be that the term Einstellung comes from Gestalt theory, which Jakobson indeed might have come into contact during the 1920's and 30's, though elucidating that connection seems as difficult a task as dissecting the Hegelian aspects of Jan Mukařovský's work (or Jakobson's, for that matter - while he himself claims ignorance in 1981m, it is difficult to read about Hegel, particularly when it comes to the subject of "hierarchies", and not get a sense that there is indeed a real connection there). In short, my inkling is that Jakobson worded "a set (Einstellung) toward the referent" intentionally like that, and that the "set" part of it has been thoroughly misunderstood. We usually understand it in the sense of "setting" (sättumus), i.e. something like orientation or the like. In contrast, look up the Einstellung effect: "Often called a problem solving set, Einstellung refers to a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though better or more appropriate methods of solving the problem exist." The whole ordeal presents two possibilities, in my opinion: whether a) the functions are some sort of psychological phenomena, in my own words, some sort of orientation as to what the speaker wishes his utterance to achieve, or b) the functions are a methodological device, useful for deconstructing the functional hierarchy of any given utterance. My reading of Jakobson tends towards the second option but the first cannot be excluded with certainty. This comes up in the following:

While these functions are the result of a predominance of function within the message itself on one of the factors, they can also occur along with other functions, but not as the predominant one: e.g., a referential message may carry expressive information and may serve as a conative appeal. In like fashion, "the poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent" (Jakobson 1981b[1960]: 25). (Waugh 2021: 20)

The answer, given what is written here, seems to be that functions are neither somehow in the speaker at the moment of speaking nor merely the toolkit the linguistic analyst employs to break a message down but somewhere inbetween - "within the message itself". Another common problem that arises with such overviews of Jakobson's functions is the role of dominant and subservient functions, particularly with the word "determining", which implies, to put it simply, that within any given utterance all the functions are present in some way or form, but one (or possibly two) of them is dominant and determines the others, meaning that there is some kind of functional dynamics going on within the message when viewed from this perspective. The problem is, while this aspect is frequently brought up and is intuitively understood, I have yet to see a breakdown or even an illustration of how this should operate. That one function dominates and determines the others appears to be pretty much an impotent theoretical insight that is never put into practice by linguists who operate with Jakobson's functions. The idea itself is enticing because what it could amount to, practically, is a view as to how a dominant feature changes the meaning of an utterance, e.g. makes an emotive utterance actually a command (conative), for example. With my focus on the phatic function, I'm exceedingly interested if there is indeed a possibility that a non-phatic utterance can become (contrary to expectation) a phatic utterance by an addition of a certain feature that re-arranges the hierarchy of functions within the message. There is theoretical potential there, I think, but development in that direction appears hampered by Jakobson's prevalent silence on the phatic function after calling it out, and the superficiality of how his scheme is employed by others. I suspect that it may take several decades yet until all the scattered hints in this direction are deciphered and the full potential of Jakobson's unique linguistic functionalism realized.

Moreover, the similarity vs. contiguity dichotomy was also used by Jakobson to deepen the definition of, in particular, the poetic function: in poetry, where focus on the message is dominant, equivalence (similarity) relations are used to build the combination rather than only to underpin statically the elements of the selection set. "In the poetic function, the relation of equivalence is projected from the axis of selection to the axis of combination" (Jakobson 1981b[1960]: 27): i.e., in the operation of combination (e.g., creating a poem), equivalence relations are more crucial when the poetic function is predominant than when it is not. According to this projection principle, parallelisms between equivalent units help to structure the poetic text; tropes built on similarity, such as metaphor, are more likely to be found in poetry, whereas metonymy is more characteristic of prose. (Waugh 2021: 21)

My own interpretation of that famous formula is somewhat different. It could very well be fundamentally erroneous because what do I know of poetry? But the way I take it is that this "projection" has something to do with the fourth category of signs, artifice, that it involves imposing equivalence or similarity on materials that in themselves are not equivalent. That is, not simply that one rhymes because some words sound similar, but that the poem can artificially liken things that are in themselves not equivalent or similar. The problem is, this stuff pertains to both the code and the message, so to say, or form and content, or whatever: rappers, for example, frequently make dissimilar words sound similar in their pronunciation. Likewise, on the side of what the poem is about, it is possible to make things that are not normally connected appear connected within 'the universe of discourse' of that poem. To take an arbitrary, and somewhat poor, example, there is an Eminem lyric that goes "I don't know why this world keep[s] turning round and round but I wish it would stop and let me off right now", which imposes an image of the world as-if it were a carnival ride and the planet's rotation could be stopped and the Earth "exited" in some way (to where? we don't yet have the technology to reverse gravity). The lyric does not create a perfect analogy, but a temporary, momentary one. To make sense of my interpretation, I guess, would require not only understanding the paradigmatic axis as "association", as it is put at the beginning of the same page, but also "contiguity" as... something like the normal way of speaking, i.e. following the "specific rules of combination ("syntactic matrices") [which] govern how phrases, clauses and sentences are formed" (ibid, 17, above). To put a stop to this, I'd say I understand the projection principle as applying that "semiotic freedom" to make novel associations - to create artifice. The compendium contains several papers on the aesthetic function so I may very soon have a chance to put my assumptions to the test.

In the latter, especially in ordinary prose, focus is on some other facet of the speech event and contiguity is the essential constructional principle. Literary prose, on the other hand, is a mixture of the referential with the poetic, and in general various types of prose have more or less of the poetic, i.e., the metaphorical, as an important (but not the predominant) structuring principle. (Waugh 2021: 21)

This is very well put. That "mixture" is, once again, related to the question of the dominant, and illustrates the possibility of there being more than one dominant function. At least this much is established - two dominant functions may "mix" and perhaps even compete in some sense. I like this passage particularly because that is how I actually feel - even scientific prose, which is as if as far from poetry as one could get, is, at least if it is "well written", constructed in such a way as to produce a sensation of enjoyment from the very selection and order of the words. That is, even though the explicit aim is to convey information, liberties can be taken as to how good it sounds when read out loud, for example. A poorly constructed text (take undergraduate term papers, for example) are barely legible in a way because the author labours at what he or she wants to convey and, paying no attention to the niceties of language, constructs a text that is very difficult to read out loud - the pauses are not where human lungs could possibly place them (sentences are way too long), or jargon-words are laid into a brick wall that becomes a tongue-twister when giving them utterance is attempted. I'm harping on a moot point, but this is truly what I believe - that a well written paper should not only be fluent enough to be easily read out loud but also employ similar-sounding words in regular sequences and other verbal tricks in the toolkit of the poet. The practical recommendation is to simply read one's text out loud frequently and improve it so as to make it easier to be read out loud.

Jakobson's coordinate concern with function and structure can also be linked with his discovery in the early 1950's of the "drafts [...] of epochal significance" (Jakobson 1971g[1966]: 346) of Charles Sanders Peirce. He characterized Peirce as "the most inventive and the most universal of American thinkers" (ibid: 345) who "in this country has been for me the most powerful source of inspiration" (1971l: v). The Peircean ideas that recur most often concern the three sign types: icon, index, and symbol, and their combinations (e.g., Jakobson 1971g[1966]: 347ff, 1971h[1967]: 661, 1971j[1968]: 699ff). He redefined them through two binary relations, the already established similarity-contiguity, and the new factual-imputed. He then added a fourth term to the sign types, namely the artifice (imputed similarity), which [|] he correlated with his work on some similarity relations in poetry. The index (factual contiguity) underlies his work on shifters and deictic categories. The icon (factual similarity) and the symbol (imputed contiguity) were particularly influential and impelled Jakobson to a more profound analysis of the non-arbitrariness of the linguistic sign (1971g[1966]) and to a rejection of the Saussurian principle of arbitrariness as too absolute (although, in 1985b[1971], Jakobson showed that Saussure himself recognized non-arbitrariness in his work on anagrams). (Waugh 2021: 22-23)

Here I'd add that since Jakobson defines Peirce's symbol as "a prescribed, conventional, and learned relation" between signans and signatum (Jakobson & Pomorska 1983: 108), these same adjectives could describe artifice - a prescribed, conventional, and learned similarity instead of contiguity; the artifice is artificial because, lacking natural/factual similarity, equivalence is imposed by convention, which amounts to repating the connection so much that it becomes ingrained: "the essential poetic artifice consists of recurrent returns" (Jakobson 1966f: 98). I should really look more closely into artifice and parallelism in Jakobson's writings, since I've gathered some exceedingly interesting hints as to what to do with it (cf. e.g. Porti-Winner 1999: 28-29), but haven't put in any real effort yet.

As a founding member of the Prague Linguistic Circle of the 1920's and 1930's, and a leader of the Russian formalists in the 1910's, Jakobson had participated in movements that consciously juxtaposed poetry to other aesthetic uses of semiotic systems (music, painting, film) and also focused on the conventionality of literature as a system of signs. Like language as a [|] whole, literature is subject to synchronic laws and to diachronic fromation and transformation; it is also interdependent with other historico-cultural phenomena, which, according to him, must be taken into account for a more integrative, that is, a more semiotic, approach to literary data. (Waugh 2021: 23-24)

From what I've gathered, the first sign (prededed only by 1928a) of Permanent Dynamic Synchrony can be found in "Problems in the Study of Language and Literature" (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1928d), which at one point suggests viewing "extraliterary material used in literature" from a functional perspective, and analysing "the correlation between the literary series and other historical series" in order to determine the evolution of literature, but these again are little more than very promising leads and currently represent for me only unrealized potential.

One of Jakobson's most important semiotic papers of the 1930's (Jakobson 1985a[1936]) analysed the sharp rift between Czech versification of the Gothic and Hussite periods. In it he details the radically different attitudes toward language and the sign in general during the Middle Ages and the Reformation and illustrates the repercussions that these opposed semiotic orientations had, not only on the metrical systems in question, but also on the chief religious and social controversy of the period, the celebration of divine communion. This study is an example of a semiotic approach toward different historical series, literary, social and religious, that is full of numerous insights relevant for contemporary semiotic inquiry. (Waugh 2021: 24)

Oh dang, this is a good lead: "Remarks on the poetry of the Hussite era" (Jakobson 1985[1935f]). I haven't read it yet because I've somehow neglected SW VI: Early Slavic Paths and Crossroads. By the description given here, it sounds very much like Juri Lotman's analysis of the role of signs and sign systems in Russia between the 11th and 19th centuries (cf. Lotman 2010d[1970] or here).

Jakobson's works on versification, collected in volume 5 of his Selected Writings (1979), display a thorough-going semiotic orientation, in that for him the ultimate question about a system of versification was its signifying value as a sign phenomenon in correlation with other poetic, literary, and broader semiotic systems. (Waugh 2021: 24)

Very exciting. I haven't yet reached SW V, I've only managed to acquaint myself with the first three volumes, the semiotics-adjacent papers from SW VII and mere bits and pieces from the rest. God, if only they'd translate all of his writings into English.

Of Jakobson's last works on the grammar of poetry, a particularly resonant study from a semiotic point of view is 1987g[1981], about a succinct and enigmatic outburst supposedly uttered by Turgenev and examined by from the phonological, morhological, grammatical, semantic, poetic, social, sexual, alimentary and culinary points of view and amply illustrates Jakobson's voraciousness in the maximal exploration of the manifold levels of the concrete speech act as a semiotic given with immense powers of referral. (Waugh 2021: 25)

Very interesting. This is "Supraconscious Turgenev". In: Language in Literature (Pomorska, Krystyna; Rudy, Stephen, eds.) Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 262-266.

Despite the fact that only one of Jakobson's articles explicitly includes the term semiotics in its title (Jakobson 1985c[1975], which is a major contribution to the historiography of semiotics), that most of his earlier work in semiotics was written in Czech (see Galan 1985, which highlights his Czech semiotic work of the 1930's; see also Jakobson, Pomorska 1983: 152-157), and that much of his later work is couched in terms of linguistics or poetics, Jakobson's work has been extraordinarily influential on the development of modern semiotics. (Waugh 2021: 26)

That's pretty much the perennial problem with Jakobsonian scholarship: so many of his writings are still in Russian, German, French, Czech, and Polish. How much is an investigation even into his scheme of linguistic functions hampered by a companion-piece, "Polish Illustrations to "Linguistics and Poetics"" (i.e. "Poetyka w świetle językoznawstwa") still being in Polish, despite the English title? The citation: Galan, František William 1985. Historical Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946. Austin: University of Texas Press. (First 16 pages available in a Google Books preview.)

Other components of the conceptual capital of modern semiotics - e.g., distinctive features (sometimes renamed pertinent features), redundancy, opposition, markedness, binarism, invariance, parallelism - either originated in or were abetted by Jakobson's linguistic work. (Waugh 2021: 26)

Nice turn of phrase. The phatic function, too, is part of that set of intellectual assets.

Jakobson was also responsible for discovering the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and the relevance of Peirce's work for linguistics, and since he was the one who led the "marriage" of linguistics (Praguean functional-structuralism) with the work of Peirce, he may be credited ultimately with introducing Peirce to linguists and to many semioticians. (Waugh 2021: 27)

Not so mistaken (above) after all.

Literary theory, too, which in its turn has had an enormous influence on semiotics, was fostered by Jakobson's work (especially Jakobson 1981b[1960], 1987d[1961], Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss 1981[1962], and Jakobson, Jones 1981[1970]), which have been "translated, paraphrased, genuflected to, attacked" (McLean 1983: 18), and there have been some imaginative applications of Jakobson's literary approach by literary scholars (see Brooke-Rose 1976; Lodge 1977, 1986; Osterwalder 1978; see also Göttner, Jacobs 1978). (Waugh 2021: 27)
  • McLean, Hugh 1983. A linguist among poets. In: Roman Jakobson: What He Taught US. International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 27, supplement: 7-19. [ESTER]
  • Brooke-Rose, Christine 1976. A Structural Analysis of Pound's Usura Canto. Jakobson's Method Extended and Applied to Free Verse. The Hague, Paris: Mouton. [De Gruyter]
  • Lodge, David 1977. The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. [ESTER]
  • Lodge, David 1986. Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [ESTER]
  • Osterwalder, Hans 1978. T. S. Eliot: Between Metaphorand Metonymy: A Study of his Essays and Plays in Terms of Roman Jakobson's Typology. Bern: A. Francke.
An important indirect influence of Jakobson's theories has been the work of Lévi-Strauss, who has said that it was through Jakobson that he received "the revelation of structural linguistics" (Lévi-Strauss 1978: xi) and who used [|] many Jakobsonian themes in his own work. Given Jakobson's impact on Lévi-Strauss, many researchers in a variety of domains are "deeply indebted to Roman Jakobson", "even though the filiation is somewhat indirect" (Leach 1983: 10). (Waugh 2021: 27-28)

Aware of this influence, but as with Saussure, I've taken it upon myself to avoid reading Lévi-Strauss on my own volition. I've dutifully read one chapter of his Savage Mind, and don't exactly yearn for more. (I'm beginning to think I might be francophobic.) Leach, Edmund 1983. Roman Jakobson and social anthropology. In: A Tribute to Roman Jakobson 1896-1982. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton, 10-16. [De Gruyter]

Gramigna, Remo 2021. Facets of signs: Roman Jakobson's semiotic thought. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 33-59.

In spite of this pivotal role, one cannot help but acknowledge a certain difficulty in pinpointing what was Jakobson's specific theoretical contribution to the 'doctrine of signs', however. As in the case fo some other [|] scholars, he was, in a way, a semiotician ante litteram, in the sense that he fostered the development of the discipline; therefore, his semiotic thought has to be minded, as it were, from the abundant deposits, which we find in his many writings on language and communication. In effect, Jakobson's works devoted to semiotics, sensu stricto, are few compared to those concerning linguistics, phonetics and poetics. As the guide to Roman Jakobson's papers, compiled by the Institute Archive and Special Collection of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, suggests, the corpus of texts dealing directly with semiotics consists, fro the most part, of papers delivered during international conferences and symposia, some of which were never published. Jakobson, for instance, presented an important report entitled "Signatum and Designatum" at the Colloque International de Sémiologie in the town of Kazimierz, Poland, in 1966 that never took the form of an article, as Jakobson himself acknowledged. (Gramigna 2021: 33-34)

Among his contributions to semiotics I would immediately pinpoint artifice and the phatic function, though the first one does not seem to have made much of an impact, and while the second has lead many who are strangers to semiotics towards some semiotic lines of thinking, it is fairly uncertain if phaticity is strictly semiotic, or should be considered more a part of communication theory, sociolinguistics, or media studies (among the many candidates). That there are more unpublished writings yet is good to hear but getting through all of his published writings in English is a lofty task, not to mention the many writings in other languages. Charles Zuckermann, for example, visited MIT's archive and found out about Mowrer, which he could have done by simply reading the paper immediately preceding "Linguistics and Poetics" in SW III. As to the general question of his semiotics, my position is "diffusionist", if that makes any sense: there are many aspects of his thinking that are not explicitly semiotic but just a few millimeters removed from being so.

Umberto Eco (1987), posing a similar question (Jakobson's main legacy for semiotics), outlined an eight-fold list of assumptions on which semiotic research is based, where the notion of sign, thought of as a "referral" to something else, appears in the first position. Jakobson had the merit of fostering the acceptance of this and other cornerstones of semiotics within the academic community [|] of his time (Eco 1987: 113). The definition of sign per se, thus, is pivotal point in discussing Jakobson's tribute to semiotics, and this paper seeks to shed light on such a notion. (Gramigna 2021: 34-35)

This is the question of renvoi, per the footnoted quote: "There is a sign every time there is a 'rélation de renvoi', a 'sending-back' relation, in other words, when aliquid stat pro aliquo" (Eco 1987: 114). Eco, Umberto 1987. The influence of Roman Jakobson on the development of semiotics. In: Classics of Semiotics. (Krampen, Martin et al., eds.) New York: Plenum Press, 109-127. [JJA] First read in 2014, so it might be time to revisit it. Over the years I've collected some curious quotes on this topic, taking it as a synonym for the function of signifying, e.g.: "This function by which one thing signifies or indicates another, and thereby leads us to consider how far one may be regarded as warrant for belief in the other, is, then, the central factor in all reflective or distinctively intellectual thinking" (Dewey 1910: 8).

Before getting to the heart of the matter, I believe it is necessary to make a preliminary clarification. It would be impossible, for a study concerned with Jakobson's semiotic thought, not to touch upon C.S. Peirce's semiotics. (Gramigna 2021: 35)

Haha, that sounds like a challenge! It would certainly be possible to write up something on the Saussurean (or Karcewski-Kruszewskian) aspects of his thinking. The real challenge would be to write about Jakobson's semiotics without bringing either Peirce or Saussure into it. The difficulty is compounded by his pre-American period constituting the least translated portion of his oeuvre.

Jakobson's concept of sign has deep roots in the history of philosophy. One could speculate, in a thought-provoking manner, that Jakobson did not have his own conception of the sign, but rather adopted notions of an ancient tradition as the underpinnings for his theory. Conscious that semiotics has a long history, he drew attention to several studies that could be thought of as [|] semiotics avant la lettre: from the well-known pioneers of semiotics (such as Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure), to less known scholars such as Johann H. Lambert. Following the Scholastic formula aliquid stat pro aliquo, Jakobson (1985d[1975]: 215) pointed out the general definition of sign he adopted: "each and every sign is a referral (renvoi)". A sign, therefore, does not stand for itself, but it is something that stands for something else. The sign is a 'referral', or, using Jakobson's own terminology, a renvoi to something other than itself. (Gramigna 2021: 35-36)

Where exactly does the renvoi originate from, though? The full sentence reads: "Each and every sign is a referral (renvoi) (following the famous aliquid stat pro aliquo)" (Jakobson 1975g: 215). Is the reason for the French word simply that this paper was first written in French? Sebeok (in Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics) uses it as if it were not simply "referral" in another language.

This said, Jakobson also made another important remark: a sign is based on an essential antinomy, that of being, at one and the same time, identical with yet different from its object. As he wrote:
Why is it necessary to make a special point of the fact that sign does not fall altogether with object? Because beside the direct awareness of the identity between sign and object (A and A1), there is a necessity for the direct awareness of the inadequacy of that identity (A is not A1). The reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes to halt, and the awareness of reality dies out. (Jakobson 1981b[1933-1934]: 750)
The sign, for Jakobson (1962: 631), has two facets: signans and signatum. Whilst signans is the "sensuous, perceptible aspect" of the sign that corresponds to the signifier, signatum is the "intelligible, or, properly, translatable aspect" that equates to the signified (Jakobson 1962: 631). (Gramigna 2021: 36)

A very good catch, from a paper titled "What is poetry?" (1934a), no less. It looks like there is actually something here to build on - as the appearance of the concept of "automatization" testifies. 1934 is not that much removed from 1928 when Jakobson collaborated with Tynjanov - he seems to still be operating with Russian Formalist premises here. Particularly interesting is the "mobility". It evokes his later fascination with Peirce's sign-development, i.e. "Jakobson's conception of communication is comprehensive and includes translation as a crucial mechanism of meaning transfer and generation at all levels" (Sütiste et al. 2021: 11). Perhaps this "mobility" stood for what was later designated by "translation"? Another thing immediately strikes me is the terms between which identity is in question: first sign and object and then sign and concept. Could it be that, for example, icon and index pertain to (sensible) objects and symbol and artifice to (intelligible) concepts?

In Jakobson's works on linguistics and semiotics, there is a consistent use of Latin terms (signum, signans and signatum) (Jakobson 1962: 631; 1971h[1965]: 345). Indeed, in this regard, he "mined the history of thought for material [he] could use" (Short 1998: 90). As we have seen, signans (used interchangeably for 'signifier') is the sensuous, perceptible side of the sign, and signatum (which stands for 'signified') is the intelligible or translatable side of it. (Gramigna 2021: 37)

Reminds me of another anecdote: he "had hardly finished [his presentation on "The Theory of Signs"] when [the behaviourist psychologist Jacob Robert] Kantor bounded forward, shouting, "Why, that was nothing but medieval philosophy!" "Not at all," I remember Jakobson retorting, "it goes back at least to Plato!"" (Sebeok 1991: 140). Identifying the intelligble side (signatum) as the "translatable aspect" (Jakobson 1962c: 631; ibid, 36, above) strikes me as something I've never thought about. It might pose an interesting question to his broad treatment of translation: is it always the "content"/object/concept that is translated, i.e. referred to by another signans? Or is there even a theoretical possibility that it is the signans that is the object of translation? A futile question, I guess.

This is the semiotic terminology that he preferred. [...] This is my own take on Jakobson. The references he makes about the nature of the sign are scattered in his writings on various subjects. Thus, the systematization of these points in a systematic whole is my own interpretation of Jakobson's thought. (Gramigna 2021: 37; fn 9)

Exactly the point of my clumsy "diffusionism" argument - many threads in his oeuvre span decades and numerous publications in various languages. Presenting Jakobson's complete treatment of any given subject is like putting together a puzzle with an indeterminate number of pieces.

Often, we speak about the influence that Jakobson exerted in diverse fields of research and on various scholars but we seldom ponder about those who influenced his thought. Indeed, who were Roman Jakobson's own teachers? [|] What were his main influences? Despite the difficulty of pinpointing a list of sources and authors that shaped his thought, it is beyond doubt that we must include the name of Sergej Karcevskij among those who most influenced him. Tullio De Mauro (1970a: vii), as well as other scholars (Grzybek 1989; Matejka 1997; Waugh, Monville-Burston 2002: viii), noted that Karcevskij was "an apostle of the Saussurian school" (Jakobson 1971d[1956]: 518). He was, in fact, a pupil of the Geneval linguist, and followed his courses starting from 1905, after which he came back to Russia in 1915, informing the young Muscovites (R. Jakobson and N. S. Trubetzkoy) about Saussure's ideas (De Mauro 1970b). (Gramigna 2021: 38-39)

Karcevskij's transportation of Saussurean ideas to Russia was what I was referring to by his "early acquaintance with de Saussure's theories - pretty nearly from the very beginning of his intellectual career" (Waugh 2021: 15, infra). Grzybek's Znakolog, turns out, is available in TLU Estonian Semiotics Repository (Uus-Sadama 5, Tallinn).

  • Grzybek, Peter 1989. Some remarks on the notion of sign in Jakobson's semiotics and in Czech Structuralism. Znakolog 1: 113-128. [ESTER]
  • Matejka, Ladislav 1997. Jakobson's response to Saussure's Cours. Cashiers de l'ILSL 9: 169-176. [Open Access]
Karcevskij's "Du dualisme asymétrique du signe linguistique" (1929), coupled with Karel Svoboda's survey devoted to the ancient theories of sign (1939), was one of the few sources addressing the question of the sign, making a specific reference to Saussure, that was available to Jakboson during the period of Czech structuralism (Grzybek 1989: 116). Grzybek holds that Jakobson adopted the idea of the parallel between Saussure and the Stoics (regarding the nature of the sign) from Svoboda, who advocated for a similar view (ibid: 117). Jakobson extensively cited Karcevskij, and to the latter he devoted an entire essay (Jakboson 1971d[1956]). Although Jakobson makes no reference to Svoboda's study, Grzybek's hypothesis is plausible. (Gramigna 2021: 39)

Eerily reminiscent of my own attempts to pinpoint Jakobson's sources. If a citation is not given you're left with guesswork, scratching the back of your head over probabilities.

Before unfolding some of the criticisms towards the affinity between Saussure and the Stoics, it is congenial to clarify some of the main ideas related to the ancient Stoic theory of meaning:
The Stoics say that three things are linked together, that which is signified (semainomenón), that wwhich signifies (semaînon), and the object of reference (tynchánon); of these that which signifies is speech, as for example, 'Dion,' that which is signified is the thing itself which is revealed by it and which we apprehend as subsisting with our thought but the barbarians do [|] not understand, although they hear the spoken word, while the object is that which exists outside, as for example, Dion himself. Of these two are corporeal, that is, speech and the object, while one is incorporeal, that is, the thing which is signified, i.e. the lekton, which is true or false. (Sextus Empiricus 1935: 140)
As it can be inferred from the passage above, there are three elements that occur in the Stoic notion of the linguistic sign: (i) semaînon (the signifier), or the sign itself as a physical entity; (ii) semainomenón (the signified), that is, what is said by the sign and which does not represent a physical entity; (iii) tynchánon (the object of reference), the object to which the sign refers. (Gramigna 2021: 40-41)

Neat stuff in itself. Translating these into Peircean idiom (while acknowledging that these are merely approximations):

  1. Representamen - "that which signifies" (semaînon), e.g. speech about someone;
  2. interpretant - "that which is signified" (semainomenón), e.g. name of a person;
  3. object - "that which exists outside" (tynchánon), e.g. the person named.
To start with, are signans and signatum "the good old term of St. Augustine", as Jakobson (1971c[1953]: 565) thought? On closer scrutiny, this statement is not necessarily due or accurate. Although signum, signans and signatum are the translation, in Latino, of /sign/, /signifier/ and /signified/, as far as I am concerned, it does not seem that St. Augustine, in his theory of signs, ever did employ such a terminology, except for the term signum, which he used extensively. Although he used the term signum ("sign"), the other two terms (signans and signatum) are foreign to him. It suffices to take a look at St. Augustine's works to prove that he used a rather different terminology, distinguishing four different elements of the sign: verbum, dicibile, dictio and res. (Gramigna 2021: 42)

Haha, this is pure gold. Where the hell did he get signans and signatum from, then? Also, St. Augustine having four instead of three aspects to something is something I've come across before - frustratingly for me, he did not simply take over the Pythagorean/Platonic triad but jammed "imagination" or something like it in there.

There is a general consensus in conceiving of St. Augustine's model of the sign as triadic inasmuch as it involves (i) the sign, (ii) what is signified and (iii) the subject to whom the sign indicates something (Jackson 1969: 13; Manetti 1993: 158; Markus 1957: 71). Jakobson's attempt of synthesis is valuable. However, whilst such conceptual overlapping is good for comparative purposes it should not be taken lightly because it might encounter the risk of flattening out some differences that are, on the contrary, quite relevant. The interesting point to note in this regard, and the conclusion thta can be drawn from the discussion, is that Jakobson seems to make a simplification from an original triadic conception of the sign to a binary model. The first instance where this simplification occurs, that seems to be inaccurate to the extent that it can create confusion, is when he equates the Saussurean conception of the linguistic sign, thought of as dyadic, with the Augustinian notion of signum, that, as we have just seen, is generally considered as triadic. As Grzybek (1989: 122) agreeably put it, Jakobson "dyadizes" the triadic notion of the sign. (Gramigna 2021: 43)

Exactly why the analogies with Peirce's triad are merely an approximation: there are subtle but significant differences. All these theories of the sign are also very sparsely introduced, which is to say that one shouldn't generalize on the basis of cursory introductions. The thing that bothers me about Sextus Empiricus' quote, for example, is that it is fairly difficult to make out from such a short excerpt what exactly is the difference between "the thing itself" (semainomenón) and "that which exists outside" (tynchánon). The word "object" appears very ambiguously in that excerpt.

Among the landmark precepts Jakobson adopted from Peirce, are his insistence on two ideas: the translatability of the sign and the trichotomy of signs. Indeed, for Jakobson (1985b[1972]: 87) "the cardinal property" that Peirce pointed out was "the translatability of any verbal sign into another, more explicit one". (Gramigna 2021: 43)

Still I remain skeptical as to Jakobson's interpretation of this "translatability". I suspect that Peirce did not actually have verbal signs in mind in the passages that inspired Jakobson - that Jakobson in a way saw what he wanted to see in Peirce. Peirce's signs were, after all, primarily "logical" or even "mathematical" in the broad sense of the term. I tend to imagine Peirce actually thinking of signs like A, B, non-A, x, y, etc. These do stand for something else, but most likely they stand for propositions. As in: "As the Boolean represent Cesara and Camestres, they appear, after literally translating the algebraic signs of those logicians into words" (CP 2.599), those "words" constituting the following syllogism: "A that is B is nothing, C that is not B is nothing, ∴ A that is C is nothing." (ibid.) It is true that Peirce does have some fairly impressive things to say about translation, e.g. how "Every translation is transitive suilation." (CP 3.594) but there is nothing of Peirce's preciseness present in Jakobson's treatment of him (what the heck is "suilation" anyway?).

Jakobson adopted the two fundamental relationships of Mikołaj Kruszewski - similarity and contiguity - as the grounding for his theory, and he applied them for interpreting Peirce's trichotomy. (Gramigna 2021: 45)

I'm not touching this with a ten-foot pole until I've personally read Hume's essay and grasped his laws of association.

It is clear that the duet contiguous/similar coupled with the opposition factual/imputed is the basis for understanding Jakobson's conceptual architecture that is behind his reading of Peirce's trichotomy. Jakobson (1985d[1975]: 215) claimed that Peirce's triad was based on these two binary oppositions (contiguous/similar and factual/imputed), nad he used them in order to put forth different types of referrals from signans to signatum. (Gramigna 2021: 45)

Very dubious. He does claim that - "This triad is based on two binary oppositions: contiguous/similar and factual/imputed" (Jakobson 1975g: 215) - but I do not see why Peirce would have done so when John Locke handed him copy, ectype and archetype (imo the original basis of icon, index, and symbol) on a platter. Not to mention that the series of "ideas" (archetypes), their realizations in the world (ectypes), and their representation in art (copies) was proposed by Plato. One can certainly break Peirce's types of signs down into these two axes but it comes across as an artificial post factum invention of Jakobson himself.

Following this line of thought, Jakobson held that, in an "index", the bond between signans and signatum is governed by an effective or factual contiguity, as in the case of "the forefingers pointing at a certain object, for instance a car" (Jakobson 1971l[1968]: 700). He also explained that in the case of an index, the connection between signans and signatum is "physical" (Jakobson 1971g[1964]: 335); therefore, as compared with icons and symbols, an index "is the only sign which necessarily involves the actual copresence of its object" (Jakobson 1971g[1964]: 335). (Gramigna 2021: 45)

Eh. By saying "physical" he's skirting around one of Hume's laws of association: causality. I'm not ready yet to dive into that rabbit hole.

Jakobson formulated the idea of the artifice, as a fourth additional variety that completes the threefold typology of Peirce, by drawing on Gerard Manley Hopkins, who, in Jakobson's own words was "the master and theoretician of poetry" (1985d[1975]: 216). I believe that this is one of the most obscure and perhaps most overlooked aspects of Jakobson's typology, although very original, which would deserve a separate study. (Gramigna 2021: 46)

I agree wholeheartedly. Jakobson's "artifice" deserves more study and separate treatment.

The code of recognized equivalences between parts and their correlation with the whole is to a great degree a learned, imputed set of parallelism which are accepted as such in the framework of a given epoch, culture, or musical school. (Jakobson 1971l[1968]: 704)
Music, as well as all sorts of artifices, is based upon "introversive semiosis" because "instead of aiming at some extrinsic object", the message signifies itself (Jakobson 1971l[1968]: 704-705). Conversely, icon, index and symbol are based upon "extroversive semiosis" inasmuch as the referential component is present (Jakobson 1971l[1968]: 704-705). For this reason, music is a language that signifies itself. (Gramigna 2021: 47)

Jakobson's explanations of artifice presented here currently go above my head. But I can't help not noticing that here, too, is an inkling of Permanent Dynamic Synchrony - here he is just about saying that the "recognized equivalences" depend on the dominant set of parallelism(s).

Visual signs, on the other hand, deal with space, are based on simultaneity and neither exhibit a hierarchical arrangement nor a make-up of discrete units (Jakobson 1971g[1964]: 337). (Gramigna 2021: 50)

On the face of it this comes across as blatantly erroneous. Isn't a written word a visual sign? Isn't it composed of discrete units (letters)?

On several occasions, Jakobson, drawing on C. S. Peirce, pointed out that "any sign requires an interpreter" (Jakobson 1971l[1968]: 702). Jakobson distinguished between addresser and addresee and used the diverse relations between them in order to classify types of messages. Jakobson distinguished three kinds of communicative situations:
  1. Intrapersonal communication;
  2. Interpersonal communication;
  3. Pluripersonal communication.
For Jakobson (1985c[1974]: 99), interpersonal communication confirms the primary role of language as a communicative tool. He singled out the existence of an additional aspect of communication that, coupled with interpersonal communication, constitutes an important way to look at the exchange of messages: intrapersonal communication. (Gramigna 2021: 52)

"This is obviously lifted from Jurgen Ruesch's (1972[1953]) synopsis of the theory of communication." (JJA 2014/06) - "Intrapersonal communication", at the very least, is uniquely Ruesch's invention. Sadly, it seems that Jakobson used "pluripersonal communication" only once ("Retrospect" to SW II, 1971d: 661). Pluripersonal imo summarizes Ruesch's "group" and "society" levels of the social matrix of communication. Jakobson had read and cited at least one of Ruesch's papers in Toward a Unified Theory of Human Behavior (Grinker ed. 1956), so he might have gleaned it from there.

In both articles, Jakobson added a third type to the other two listed above: "pluripersonal communication" (Jakobson 1971l[1968]: 702; 1971k[1967]: 661). Whilst interpersonal communication is a one-to-one communicative situation, and intrapersonal communication is a less-than-two person system, pluripersonal communication involes a "more-tha-two person system with a plurality of participants and with a developing distinction between the true addressee of the child's message and unaddressed auditors" (Jakobson, Waugh 1988[1979]: 81). (Gramigna 2021: 53)

I stand corrected. The term "pluripersonal" does appear only once - the "1971l[1968]: 702" (1970d in the bibliography) is mistaken, the page discusses intrapersonal communication and ostension, but "pluripersonal" or even the subject matter itself does not appear there. The quote here, on the other hand, is a good catch, and does add something valuable to the concept of pluripersonal communication, connecting it with the topic of on-listeners (discussed further in 1964e and elsewhere: see "virtual recipient", "virtual interlocutors", etc.). It is very likely that he addresses pluripersonal communication elsewhere and it is only a matter of finding the scattered remarks.

Gvoždiak, Vít 2021. On metalanguage: Toward Jakobson's fundamental semiotics. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 60-80.

Despite the thousands of pages devoted to Roman Jakobson's well-nigh limitless scientific interests, little has been said about the place of metalanguage in his theory, often being relegated to a short remark about its position in Jakobson's communication model or discussed in the context of his other major conceptions. This paper attempts to follow a different route: to consider metalanguage as a key term and indicate its most relevant connections to meaning of signs, communication success, and the nature of science. (Gvoždiak 2021: 60)

The "short remark" might be endemic to the functions in his scheme overall - there's no limit to writings in which the phatic function is glossed over with five or six words, making absolutely no impact on whatever is actually the subject of the research. Jakobson's interests are indeed broad and deep. The aspects (meaning, adequacy, science) connected with metalanguage make intuitive sense even without elaboration. It also seems true that the metalingual function is frequently neglected. The sole exception I'm aware of is "Less than seven types of reflexivity" (Dasgupta 1975), which is a short (8 pages) but extremely thick examination of it.

Jakobson's interest in metalanguage is apparently mainly in his writings from the 1950s, but he consistently returns to this problem in varous contexts and forms so that metalanguage remains one of his "favorite topics" (Jakobson 1985h[1981]: 374) up until the end of his career. This is, however, in a rather unsystematic way, which is further complicated by the fact that every discussion of Jakobson's notion of metalanguage should be performed only in "laboratory" conditions of artificial extraction from the totality of Jakobson's theoretical, semiotic thought. (Gvoždiak 2021: 60)

This "unsystematic" nature of Jakobson's writings seems to come up frequently - see my notes on "diffusionism" above; notes on metalanguage, like everything else, is scattered around (to borrow Gramigna's fortuitous word) the Selected Writings. Here I sadly take issue with two points. I don't exactly agree that it is a "fact" that an examination of anything in Jakobson's corpus "should" be performed in an artificial vacuum. Beyond the pedantic quibble that a prescription can't be a fact (facts are descriptive), I don't think it's a valid recommendation. Ideally, one wouldn't need to extract the particular aspect unders study from the rest of Jakobson's oeuvre, but exactly the opposite - it would be best to demonstrate how any given notion of his, for example (if it be an analysis of term or concept), operates in those many and disparate categories Waugh's paper is a run-down of (language, signs, phonology, functions, metaphor, shifters, Peirce, poetics, mythology, grammar, film, music, etc.). In my opinion the presentation (his writings) are unsystematic from the readers point of view, but Jakobson's thinking itself is quite systematic; this is partly why his topics are so scattered or diffuse - you can see him applying the same way of thinking and, in better cases, the same terminology, on a wide variety of phenomena. The second quibble is that I don't think he actually says that metalanguage is one of his favorite topics but merely happens to mention "mastering language and metalanguage" (1981m: 374) as an aspect of what I think is actually one of his favorite topics - "the nearly regular order of children's verbal acquisitions and of aphasic losses" (ibid, 374). And even this, I think, is merely a manifestation of what seems to be the actual favorite topic of his - "The question of invariance in the midst of variation" (ibid, 371). In this particular case, the child acquires and the aphasic loses language in opposite directions (variation), but the order in which they do so is the same (invariance). Generally I don't doubt that metalanguage is indeed one of his favorite topics, but the mere appearance of the term in that paper is not solid evidence of that.

Nevertheless, a tentative summary of Jakobson's interests in metalanguage can be divided into two main areas (see Jakobson 1985d[1975]: 186) which roughly correspond to the two sections (of unequal length) of this paper. (Gvoždiak 2021: 60)

This could have been quoted in full: "The pristine origin of linguistic science is quite explicable. Language when used to talk about language is labeled metalanguage; linguists' discourse about language is an elaborate implementation of metalanguage, and since, moreover, any child's progressive acquisition of language is indispensibly joined with mastering the use of metalanguage, such primordial deliberations on language favor and further the emergence of a genuine inquiry into the verbal code." (Jakobson 1975f: 186)

The first of these involves the conviction that "[w]e practice metalanguage without realizing the metalinguistic character of our statements" (Jakobson 1985f[1976]: 117). Metalanguage should be reserved not only for the science of logic or scientific semantics; it is an automatic, subliminal, and everyday practice of communication. This type will be called "the communicative metalanguage". (Gvoždiak 2021: 60)

It is certainly an "everyday" thing, a normal part of communication. But what exactly makes it "automatic" or "subliminal"? Are we not aware of doing so when we explain our use of language to another person? If anything, such instances make us more aware of the adequacies and inadequacies of language as a means of communication. It could be added that this inadequacy probably concerns technical language more so than everyday language, as we have to ask someone explain their use of words in cases when we either do not know what the word means or when the word has special connotations in some particular field which are not present in the ordinary use of the same words. In my opinion this constitutes another aspect of the "technical" side of metalanguage. "Communicative metalanguage" itself sounds good, though I'm not all that pleased that the object is metalanguage qua language, and not metalingual operations - understandably, "metalanguaging" is clumsy and too technical ("languaging"? you mean talking?).

The inability of naming, which can be observed in certain aphasics, means - according to Jakobson - "a loss of metalanguage" (Jakobson 1971e[1956]: 248); the impairment of selection/substitution - being one of the two basic operations needed for successful communication - "involves a deterioration of metalinguistic operations" (Jakobson 1971e[1956]: 254). (Gvoždiak 2021: 61)

An illustration of the futility of my previous quibble: Jakobson himself appears to use "metalanguage" and "metalinguistic operations" interchangeably. My uncertainty lies in whether or not there is such a thing as a "metalanguage" in everyday language, whereas there is definitely a metalanguage in linguistic science, e.g. the very names of the functions (emotive, conative, referential, etc.) are parts of language about language itself. The selection/substitution impairment, if I recall correctly, amounts to not being able to paraphrase something, to find another way of naming or describing something.

The second type - as well as the second section of this paper - will be called "the scientific metalanguage". It is related to the very nature of the linguistic enterprise, or to be more precise, of the linguistic enterprise as a science, since metalanguage is one of the key factors in considering linguistics as a branch of semiotics (see Benveniste 1971: 14). Even though Jakobson often mentions "a scientific role" of metalanguage, by which he means that the origin of this term should be traced back to logic, namely to the work of Alfred Tarski (see Jakobson 1981[1960]: 25; Jakobson 1985f[1976]: 117) or to Rudolf Carnap's Meaning and Necessity (see Jakobson 1971e[1956]: 247-248), he never really and explicitly discusses any of these "scientific" uses in detail or proposes his own explicit view on what this scientific metalanguage in fact is. As the point of departure for an explication of the "scientific metalanguage" will be taken the differentiation between object language and metalanguage. (Gvoždiak 2021: 61)

Very suitable designation. My own major take-away on this subject is that by scientific metalanguage he broadly means "technical" language of all stripes. Consider, for example, the following exerpt: "More or less formalized languages used as artificial constructs for various scientific or technical purposes may be termed transforms of natural language" (Jakobson 1969c: 659). It seems to imply that even scientific metalanguage is little more than formalized language. It makes a lot of sense in light of the philosophers' tendency to give everyday words ("being" and whatnot) special significance by, yeah, formalizing it in a way, giving them some higher form of organization. This is more noticeable with multilexemic terminology, i.e. slap together some five-dollar-words like "orderly concurrence of aptitudes" and you have created a new term (in this particular case, for something that probably has numerous such labels, its meaning amounting little more than the (quasi-?)creationist Leibnizian dictum that God created the world in best way it could).

As Michiel Leezenberg (2008: 14) points out, it is probably the separation between the communicative and scientific modes of metalanguage that leads to the overlooking of this concept by linguists and philosophers (of language). Even Jakobson's own usage of the term should after all be seen as more of a promotional gesture rather than an elaborated project. It turns out, then, that the two views are not clearly separated and share many common features. (Gvoždiak 2021: 61)

An apt evaluation. The case is very similar with the phatic function, which actually did a great job at further popularizing the term. But overall, this is a spot-on observation because Jakobson does indeed spend a good portion of his writings on reporting the results and methods of others. In his scheme of linguistic functions, I'd point out, none of the names of the functions are original. Arguably none of it is exactly original but more-or-less a summary of what numerous investigators had been working on for decades. This struck me at point when I still considered the name of the "conative" function to be innovative, only to find out that "conation" was a common term for "willing" in 19th century rational psychology (see the journals Mind and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, for example, for frequent discussions of conation). As to the substance here, I'm not yet convinced and would have to read the source: Leezenberg, Michiel 2008. Metaphor and metalanguage. Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication 3: 1-24. My doubt hinges on me not really seeing the separation between these two types of metalanguage as very clear and distinct.

The well-known and widely accepted place of metalanguage is rooted in Jakobson's (1981[1960]) communication model as one of the six constitutive factors of any communicative act; the metalanguage is a functional realization of the code. (Gvoždiak 2021: 62)

Oof, I'm a pedant for sure, but metalanguage is not one of the constitutive factors, code is, and the metalingual operation is what I call a "meta-function" of the code, with the addendum that poetic and phatic functions, too, constitute meta-functions: every message is necessarily emotive, conative, and referential, because every message has an adresser, (minimally a virtual) addressee, and some context (if not a referential object), but not every message is poetic in the sense of foregrounding language itself, explaining language itself, or about the communicative contact itself. This distinction, which I consider sufficiently clear and distinct, constitutes that one more paper about Jakobson that I still have to write, alluded to in the beginning of this post. This pedantism is unwarranted, as the point is sufficiently clear: metalanguage (or metalinguistic operation) is best known from his scheme or linguistic functions and not, for example, from his discussion of shifters and his "duplex structures", from which in my opinion his unique take on the metalingual function comes from. Calling the scheme a "communication model" I'll forgive because calling it so is common practice. I just heard from one of the authors in this volume that Luis Prieto shared this view and protested like I do against calling it a communication model. On the other hand, the phraseology here is commendable: "metalanguage is a functional realization of the code". Sadly, this formula cannot be expanded to the other two metafunctions (poetry is not a functional realization of the addressee, phaticity is not the functional realization of contact), but it does point to something significant: all three metafunctions involve a "breakdown" of some sort - a breakdown of the normal functioning of language, so to say. In the case of the metalinguistic function it is the malfunctioning of the "common code" that is highlighted: the interlocutors realize that the languages that they speak are slightly different and requires mutual adjustment; in the case of the poetic function it is a breakdown of the communication "model" itself, as the poem is not a communicative message by default (it may not have an addressee, and in fact be an incommunicative extension of the expressive function), not to mention the fact that the poetic function, according to Jakobson, is almost an intentional breaking down of language, shaking up the normal semantic associations of everyday language and reorganizing language in a novel way that provides aesthetic enjoyment; in the case of the phatic function the "breakdown" concerns the normal procedure of communication - the communicants become self-conscious of the fact of being in a communicative situation when there is nothing left to say (the subject matter runs out and one has to resort to cliches or situational awareness like commenting about the weather), for example, or when there is some psychological interference and the speaker realizes (per Alonso 2002) that "contact" is a fickle thing, that the "psychological connection" between the speaker and listener is not a given but something that has to as-if kept alive on an ongoing basis, sometimes by artificial means (like the cliches). Now that I think about it, the phraseology requires only a slight modification to serve my own purposes: the metafunctions, specifically (and not the core, fundamental or "foundational" functions, as I've called them in an unpublished manuscript long ago) constitute a functional derealization of their respective correspondant functions (emotive-poetic, conative-metalingual, and referential-phatic). Borrowing this term is inspired by Bo Burnham's Inside, which at one point (the song titled "That Funny Feeling") recommends googling "derealization" and warns that one may not like what it is (presumably, because most people have experienced derealization without realizing, no pun intended, that they've done so, not knowing the term). This "derealization" is a very specific psychological phenomenon but could metonymically stand for the types of breakdowns I've outlined, and in Alonso's piece it looks like it is if not exactly then more-or-less approximately the experience in question: as-if "waking up" in the middle of a conversation with another person and realizing that you're not fully sure what's going on. Personally, I've experienced this numerous times in my life. One of the most memorable instances was at work, when I was crouching down besides a working machine for a while and then stood up, had that rush of blood experience where you nearly lose consciousness and pass out (fall down flailing, etc.) and then seeing your situation as if for the first time ever: oh wow, I'm here, this is what's going on, what the f***. This is just a wandering thought, employing "derealization" for this very specific communication-theoretical purpose would require a lot of legwork that may be completely unnecessary, as the some arguments could very well be advanced by employing Jakobson's own terminology and outlook, I think, and would be more convincing if they were in fact rooted deeply in Jakobson's own writings rather than some psychological term that just happens to be gaining traction at the moment.

Despite its key "scientific" use, the metalanguage "plays also an important role in our everyday language" (Jakobson 1981[1960]: 25). This role is apparent in those cases when "the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code" (Jakobson 1981[1960]: 25). It is, however, not merely the certainty of using the same code - even though this formulation by Jakobson is a key hint for interpreters of his semiotic theory - the metalingual operations "make it possible to assure full and accurate communication between speakers" (Jakobson 1985g[1978]: 157) in the first place: it is the code and its metalingual manifestations that guarantee successful communication. (Gvoždiak 2021: 62)

The point itself is solid: metalingual operations do indeed clarify uses of language, eliminate the discrepancies that stem from lingual differences between the communicants and thus works towards achieving adequate communication (if not perfect communication). The problematic part, for me, is the premise itself, because I'm not fully on board with Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions being a "communication model" oriented towards successful communication. In my opinion the scheme merely illustrates the various functions of language, the six goals that use of language can achieve; and the six functions Jakobson outlines do not exhaust the possible functions, notable additions being the magical and regulative uses of language, though, admittedly, if one wished to do so, the magical could be subsumed under either poetic or emotive, and the regulative under conative or phatic, though these identifications would not be perfect. The problem this treatment poses for me, specifically, stems from my attempt to visualize the scheme. In my theory, the metalingual function is not merely a functional realization of the code, if this phraseology can is acceptable, but also with the factor of the addressee. It is the listener or receiver, whose knowledge of language is in question - the addresser could very well construct a message that's composed of several languages (estonglish, chinglish, spanglish, etc.) which becomes a problem for the addressee when he knows the host language but does not know the guest language, if they may be called so (clumsy, this). In any case, the point can be succinctly stated thus: the metalingual function operates for the benefit of the addressee. For the addresser, his or her own code is unproblematic, and could very well involve not only technical jargon bud indeed foreign languages or even idiolectic made-up language ("foundational functions" and "correspondant factors" in my own usage comes to mind). All in all, I think it worth while to point out that achieving "full and accurate communication" comes about by letting the addressee in on the addresser's code. If one wished to go deeper, it could be possible to elaborate upon the fact that the addressee probably already has, at the moment of hearing an unknown word, some assumptions about what the word might mean, and the metalingual operation, from this standpoint, consists in the addresser correcting the addressee's assumptions. Such is the case, for example, when the listener mishears and misunderstands the speaker's words. From personal experience I can attest to a situation in which I was about to do a presentation on nonverbal communication and a person I would very much would have liked to attend it skipped out because he thought that I was about to lecture about nonviolent communication, in which he was not interested at all. The first four letters of the term became a determining factor, the rest be damned. It might actually be an instance of Miller's Law in operation; the law states that "the number of objects an average person can hold in working memory is about seven", whereas experimental psychology is downsized that number to three or four (and further clustering into three or four, which may also go to explain why triadic philosophical systems are so common - the magic number three - and why there are few systems, like St. Augustine's, where the standard is four). That is, register the three or four first letters of a word and you're done, you've read it.

The process of metalingual "checking up", according to Jakobson, is characteristic of exchanges such as "'The sophomore was plucked'. 'But what is plucked?' 'Plucked means the same as flunked'. 'And flunked?' 'To be flunked is to fail an exam'." (Jakobson 1981[1960]: 25) - and indicates the dialogical disposition of metalanguage that should not be sought in an extraordinary formal logic of truth since metalanguage is for the interlocutors what prose is for (Molière's) Jourdain. It just so happens that the metalingual operations are making explicit what is usually automatic, invisible, and subliminal, what remains hidden in everyday communication, and are in fact a reassuring habit or a convention of the code itself that need not to be thought through and over unless called for by a partial misunderstanding. (Gvoždiak 2021: 62)

Okay, yeah, this makes sense. I enquired above about the automatic and subliminal aspects and this is it. Not bad. It's almost always a welcome experience when a text raises curious questions in the beginning and actually does answer them at some point. Well done. Substantially, the author is very briefly glossing over some major points in Jakobson's theory of metalanguage, if such a phrase is warranted (it probably is). First, the type of dialogue exemplified by the quote is likened, if I recall correctly by Jakobson himself, with the frequent exchanges between children and parents, where the child keeps asking "Why?" and the parent is frustrated because explaining something they know very quickly leads to them having to explain things that they don't actually know or aren't sure about. In this scenario, what strikes me is that, the child is almost like "The stranger" (according to Freud and Bauman), whose lack of what the "protagonist" (lacking a proper term) takes to be common knowledge, has to confront someone whose curious questions set the "protagonist" (again, not even etymologically valid term for the first person) up for a kind of "derealization" (*sigh*) that what he or she takes for granted is actually, in itself, quite strange (in linguistic terms, the metalingistic enquiry foregrounds the arbitrariness of language - what poetry does, at least according to Jakobson, consciously and intentionally to produce the very effect, but in this case accidentally - the speaker, normally, does not wish to be misunderstood). I take this point to be very well made because "what remains hidden in everyday communication" does not necessarily have to be "automatic, invisible, and subliminal" but it does *click* with what I consider to be truly one of Jakobson's favorite topics - permanent dynamic synchrony (because this he actually lists as an area that "belong[s] among my favorite themes of investigation" (1981m: 374), specifically "Time and space" as intrinsic constituents of the verbal code). That is, I think that "what remains hidden in everyday communication" is exactly the variability of the verbal code - in a way, every person who has ever lived or will live has a unique hierarchy of subcodes that constitute their "language", that even if not the verbal constituents (the words themselves) are not different, the way they are used, how they are put into use, varies functionally in a "deeper" sense of the word: not only can the same word have different meanings for different people but also the very same sequence of words can fulfill different functions for different people (one person's profoundest spiritual self-expression is another's ironic quip, e.g. "pray for me", "thoughts and prayers", etc.). One thought that found me mulling over this passage is the significance of "calling for". Obviously, the most common metalingual exchange is A uttering something that includes a word or expression unfamiliar to B, which prompts B to enquire A about the meaning of said word or expression, and A giving an explanation that may range from pointing out a synonym up to a lecture about the historical background of said word or expression. But then there are also cases where A includes an explanation of a word or expression just employed in anticipation of B's lack of knowledge, e.g. "...and then blablabla, and what I mean by blablabla is..." This is connected with the second aspect glossed over here, Jourdain "spoke prose, yet was completely ignorant that it was called prose" (Jakobson 1953e: 224). My point here is simply that metalingual operations are not necessarily reactive (retrospective) but can also be anticipative (precluding any reaction) - the speaker can go about "metalanguaging" in a way that is by no means "automatic, invisible, and subliminal" but fully conscious of the linguistic limitations of the listener(s), or one's own linguistic idiosyncracies, and in worst cases even to the point of being "self-conscious" and losing the track to explaining language that doesn't require explanation even in completely uneducated company. That is, metalanguaging is in my opinion not neccesarily a "dialogical disposition" but could very well be a "personal disposition", as in the Well, ackshually... personality who relishes etymology and historical context to a (character) fault. Veering towards that case myself, clearly, I'd further point out that within the complex syntax of the last sentence in this quote the "reassuring habit", which I take as working towards "successful communication", is somewhat problematic. Sure, in explaining a word or expression one is in some measure affirming, while simultaneously expanding, the other's linguistic competence - one explains his or her use of language and the listener can affirm, "that's what I thought". Yet, there is also the case of "anticipative" metalanguaging going awry and the speaker's constant self-explanation bringing on a breakdown - the curious case of "mansplaining" comes to mind: his attempts to clarify himself to her come across as insulting her intelligence, trying to explain to her something she's already much more knowledgeable about.

Even though Jakobson's communication model may provide an analytical tool for defining communicative constituents (addresser, message, addressee, context, contact and code) and their respective functions (emotive, poetic, conative, referential, phatic, and metalingual), it does not insist on understanding concrete communicative acts or texts as fulfilling only one of these functions. This is an inevitable conclusion since the totality of [|] communicative behaviour necessarily involves all of the elements. (Gvoždiak 2021: 62-63)

Here's where I perform my well practiced song and dance routine about how the scheme is not a functioning model of communication because it includes only one channel and does not include any form of feedback. This overview is actually better than most because the wording here is precise: it's "an analytical tool for defining communicative constituents [...] and their respective functions", and that is all it appears to be good for. That is, what linguists usually get out of it is half a page of text reiterating the constituents and functions in Jakobson's scheme, and in some cases they can identify that something in their linguistic corpus is in accord with the definition of some function or other. The fact that any given message may have more than one function is acknowledged. Well done. The next natural step would be to highlight that any given message has a hierarchy of functions, in which one of the three primary functions is the dominant, and the other two are subordinated but implicitly there. After that comes my cacophonic drum solo about how the three metafunctions are normally not operative unless the message includes a part, or is as a whole, poetic, metalingual or phatic. But now comes the interesting part: if the metalingual function is dominant, let's say that it's a message that clarifies the meaning of a word, is it not referential? Or if the message is poetic, what's the role of the emotive function in that message? And what's even more difficult: if the dominant function of the message is phatic, then how does it subordinate the other functions? This amounts to asking, what kinds of interrelations there are between the various functions and factors? My point here is that simply identifying the dominant function of a given message is not making full use of the "analytical tool" that Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions is. My standing position is that Jakobson's scheme is not fully realized and in a way poorly understood because most people don't go beyond "Linguistics and Poetics", and probably find the piece tedious, as I once did, after the first six pages or so when he gets to the "poetics" portion. The problem is, Jakobson himself does not apply the full scheme in that paper, in fact he basically never does so. That paper only dives into the poetic function. Where the real gold is buried is his many poetic analyses (e.g. Selected Writings III: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry), where he actually does employ his functions, though - as has been brought up several times already - in a scattered manner, and in many instances without naming the label of the function he's examining by the same term he uses in "Linguistics and poetics". For example, you'll find him discussing imperatives and vocatives much more so than you do of the "conative" function - you just have to know that connection; likewise whenever you find him discussing "physiognomic features" - you have to know the connection with the emotive function. The way I see this situation is that "Linguistics and Poetics", at least its theoretical portion, is an analogue of a legend on a map, an overview of what the signs and symbols mean. In this analogy, the hierarchical organization of the factors and functions is the map itself, and linguistic material (the message) would be the terrain. From my perspective, it looks like most people take a look at the legend and then go explore the terrain. They recognize a landmark and know "yeah, that kind of thing corresponds to something in the legend", and they can roam the terrain freely and identify types of objects. What's missing is the map itself - the interrelation between the map and the terrain which they should be constructing with the analytical tools they're provided. That doesn't seem to happen a lot, not even in Jakobson's own writings. My current hope, which awaits resulting either in disappointment or something brilliant, is that the answer lies in permanent dynamic synchrony, which incorporates the topics of the dominant, hierarchical organization, variance and invariance, and the interrelated factors of time and space as a cherry on top. I guess I'll continue practicing this song and dance routine until I either trip, fall, and break some bones, becoming unable to continue the practice, or until I've perfected it to the point that it may be performed in front of a larger audience without embarrassment.

There is a difference, though, between interpersonal and intrapersonal communication (Jakobson 1985a[1974]: 99): each of them fulfils a different function, the first being a tool for bridging space, the latter being a tool for bridging time. To conceive a text manifesting only, say, the emotive, intrapersonal, or inner dialogue function would mean that only the addresser is involved and, strictly speaking, no communication is taking place at all. In such situation it would be not even be appropriate to use the term "communication" at all, as Jakobson (1985a[1974]: 99) himself suggests. (Gvoždiak 2021: 63)

Oh heck yeah. As with most passages in this curious paper, this one, too, gets something wrong (in my opinion), and simultaneously something very right. What I find fault with is setting the emotive, intrapersonal, and inner dialogue function on a par as if they were on an equal footing, or actually different signifiers for the same thing. Intrapersonal communication is another one of my favorite topics, and I've already written a paper that examines this concept in Peirce, Mead, Morris, Ruesch, Jakobson, and Lotman (cf. Rebane 2018, which is sadly in Estonian). While the chain of influence I outline is not equally solid throughout, I think it inarguable that Ruesch did get some inspiration from Morris, supported by his borrowing much more than only this aspect from Morris's work, that Jakobson really did take over this concept (even using the same term, "intrapersonal communication") from Ruesch, and Lotman in turn from Jakobson. The latter two both reiterate the same point about inter- and intrapersonal communication bridging space and time, respectively, and even at least on specific illustration, the Russian habit of tying a knot in one's handkerchief to remind oneself of something. I cannot abide viewing intrapersonal communication as a function of some kind because that would imply that interpersonal communication, too, is a function. No, I think that they are levels of communication, and constitute - analogically with his famous (or at least frequently repeated, as it has also appeared in this volume, cf. Waugh 2021: 15) scheme of disciplines nested inside each other in concentric circles. In my opinion it is a mirror of Ruesch's levels of abstraction: intrapersonal communication occurs within a single person, interpersonal communication between two people, and pluripersonal communication between more than two people. Like the disciplines, they are nested concentrically: within a multiperson gathering, two people are talking, let's say, and each person is simultaneously communicating intrapersonally - one of the major points of intrapersonal communication theory (not the best designation but what else would one call it?) is that intra- and interpersonal communication always occur simultaneously: when communicating with other people one is always necessarily also communicating with oneself. Now, taking intrapersonal communication to be merely a variety of communication, and not itself a function, the significant theoretical consequence is that one's messages to oneself, too, can carry all the functions available (one can conatively give oneself a command, a goal, call oneself to attention, etc. - the conative is merely the easiest one to illustrate). This one is not a head-scratcher, in my opinion. One fine day I may even write a paper that delves deeper into the operation of linguistic functions in intrapersonal communication. Now, where the author gets something very right is doubting in the validity of applying "communication" to forms of semiotic activity that do not involve an addressee. Most likely due to the very same confusion about the scheme of linguistic functions being a "communication model", it has become a very common practice to apply Jakobson's scheme on nonverbal and incommunicative phenomena. A prominent example is Umberto Eco's application of the scheme on architecture, which to me reads in some parts like complete nonsense - culminating in curiosities like calling malfunctioning or unnoticeable fountains in public spaces "phatic fountains" (Robertson 2003: 57). This tendency, which I noticed very frequently when I started reading semiotics journals in bulk, I have taken the liberty of calling "communicationalization". It's a mouthful, but that's the best name I can think of: viewing something that is not actually communication as if it was a form of communication. One of my favorite illustrations, for which I have sadly lost the citation, comes from a paper in ecosemiotics which concluded with something along the lines of a toxic lake, I think it was, "communicating" with human beings when children go to swim in it and emerge with a skin rash. There is no end to phenomena that can be forced into a model of communication. The legitimacy of doing so, on the other hand, becomes very apparent when you're investigating the phatic function and have to consider what exactly is the nature of "contact" in such instances. Overall, I've considered writing a piece that examines this phenomenon in academic literature in conjunction with a parallel phenomenon associated with Malinowski's phatic communion, in which case the primary crux of the matter seems to stem from some people confusing "phatic" and "emphatic", with the result that they view various forms of communication and practices as fostering a community or the like, quite contrary to Malinowski's very argument about phatic communion. Only recently did I realize that this could be called "communionization". Aside from having these way-too-long names, both point to a fundamental misunderstanding of respective authors' intentions and methodology.

To find its exact position, however, a fruitful way to approach the problem of communicative metalanguage could involve reduction of the communicative six-term whole to a simple opposition, choosing the poetic function as the single metalingual counterpart. In this sense, Jakobson's (1981[1960]: 27) frequently cited claim about the principle of the poetic function as the projection of the equivalence principle on the axis combination has no significance on its own, but gains its true importance in comparison with its metalinguistic counterpart. (Gvoždiak 2021: 63)

Fascinating, because unfamiliar. Once again could have benefitted from a full-length quote: "It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synchronic expressions into an equational sentence: A = A ("Mare is the female of the horse"). Poetry and metalanguage, however, are in diametrical opposition to each other: in metalanguage the sequence is used to build an equation, whereas in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence" (Jakobson 1960d: 27). The difficulty for me is the equivalence between "equivalent units" and "equation". In metalanguage, which "makes a sequential use of equivalent units", the "equation" appears to signify the formula, 'this means that', whereas in the case of poetry, there typically aren't such equation (they may be but poetry on the whole is not made up of these sorts of metalinguistic explications). So what does he mean by saying that "in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence". I would think that he's not saying that metalinguistic explications are the basis of poetry, that writing poetry somehow stems from saying what certain words mean or what some things are. In poetry, it is "the principle of equivalence" that is operative, as he put it on the same page with a Russian Formalist term, in poetry, "Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence". In the very same paragraph he lists the types of units between which the principle of equivalence is operative: syllable, word stress, lack of word stress, prosodic long, prosodic short, word boundary, no word boundary, syntactic pause, no syntactic pause. All of them can be "equalized" in a poem, which amounts to pretty much the same thing as Lotman's dictum that poetry is a highly organized use of language, that poetic language is more ordered than the language in prose. This is, according to him (on the next page), unique to poetry: "Measure of sequences is a device that, outside of the poetic function, finds no application in language. Only in poetry with its regular reiteration of equivalent units is the time of the speech flow experienced, as it is [...] with musical time" (1960d: 28). Having looked over the passage indicated, I cannot see how it supports the claim that "the principle of the poetic function [...] has no significance on its own, but gains its true importance in comparison with its metalinguistic counterpart". Perhaps there are other passages that support this view, but the one indicated appears to be doing little more than contrasting these two functions as-if only because the logic of selection and combination is reversed and pointing it out is poetical in itself. That is to say that I think that his frequently cited statement, "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination", would still have "significance on its own", even if Jakobson had never formulated the this statement. Attempting to look up the earliest appearance of this formulation (it appears to be rather late), I found a serviceable paraphrase: "in poetry similarity is superimposed [projected] on contiguity" (Jakobson 1968c: 92). This gives me flashbacks of "duplex structures", but it's kinda early to get into that. Here I may test out the same reversal: in metalanguage, is contiguity superimposed on similarity? It would appear so, as it amounts to little more than saying that two verbal units with identical meaning ("Mare" and "the female of the horse") can be conjoined with the verb "is", thus expressing the equivalence of code in a message.

Most importantly, the poetic and metalingual functions - independent among adults but mixed in children's speech (see Jakobson 1971j[1962]: 286) - correspond to the two key constituents of the communication model, the code and the message, the terms that in Jakobson's theory have replaced the traditional Saussurean langue-parole dichotomy because "the Code-Message concepts of communication theory are much clearer, much less ambiguous, and much more operational than the traditional presentation of this dichotomy in the theory of language" (Jakobson 1971c[1953]: 559). (Gvoždiak 2021: 63)

Again, exceedingly fascinating. The citation is to "Anthony's Contribution to Linguistic Theory" (Jakobson 1966e), which was written as an introduction to Ruth Weir's Language in the Crib (1962). It is one of my favorite episodes in Jakobson's work because he returns to it frequently in The Sound Shape of Language (cf. Jakobson & Waugh 1979d: 81; 166; 221; Waugh 1979: 270). The only other reference to Weir occurs a year earlier in a paper titled "On the Linguistic Approach to the Problem of Consciousness and the Unconscious" (Jakobson 1978d), and has such a direct bearing upon this subject matter that it may be quoted at length: "the child's initial language-acquisition is accompanied and secured by a parallel development of the metalingual function, which enables the child to delimit the verbal signs he masters and to elucidate for himself their semantic applicability. "Virtually every new word stimulates an effort in the child to interpret its meaning", Gvozdev declares and, with that declaration in mind, cites questions and thoughts typical for children. For example: "Are sdoxla and okolela the same?" [...] "It's people you say tolstyj ('fat') about, but about a [|] bridge you say širokij ('wide')"; "Ubirajut ('remove or dress up') means ukrašajut ('decorate'), doesn't it?"" (Jakobson 1978d: 157-158). Aside from the great examples of the metalingual function in operation, what strikes me is elucidating "semantic applicability", which amounts to saying that the child is testing out if there is an equivalence between given units. According to the logic of selection and combination, the child proposes two units in sequence and enquires into their equivalence or difference (e.g. you say this about animate and that about inanimate things). As to the emphasized portion, which struck me as something new to me, I did indeed find the exact quote: "A typical property of children's speech is an intimate interlacement of two functions - the metalingual and the poetic one - which in adult language are quite separate" (Jakobson 1966e: 286). Interlaced they indeed are, as exemplified in the following: "Particularly clear-cut in their construction are jocular concatenations of words, alternating their distinctive features one after the other, such as in an example of Czech children's play quoted by Ohnesorg (1966): "Dípa - kípa - títa - bádu - dábu - mábu." The directive role of sounds, their alliterations and assonances in children's argumentation is beautifully exemplified by H. Wallon (1945: 57)" (Jakobson & Waugh 1979d: 221). By "jocular concatenation of words" he means constructing a sequence of similar-sounding words ("alternating their distinctive features one after the other", which according to common sense even might be connected with testing out if these similar-sounding words have any meaning. This, I imagine, is a quite normal procedure for poets and rappers. This is summarized in an Appendix to The Sound Shape of Language as "the verbal play which children seem to delight in and to use as a dynamic part of the acquisition process" (Waugh 1979: 270). Thus, mixing poetic and metalingual functions in children's speech is indeed reinforced by other instances in SW. One may merely qualify that this probably does not apply to "children's speech" sui generis but primarily to those "half-dream, presleep soliloquis" (1979d: 81) in which the child's inner speech is vocalized out loud in the evident absence of any listeners. That they are completely independent in adults, on the other hand, I wouldn't agree to absolutely. It seems self-evident that such instances can also occur in adult second language acquisition and, moreover, if the metalingual or poetic function are taken broadly enough, one can probably find poetic-aesthetic considerations in adult metalanguaging as well, perhaps even in such mundane occurrences as constructing scientific terminology with a mind (at least partly) as to their sound qualities, e.g. alliteration and such.

Even in this more restricted context, the metalingual function can be defined without appeal to the remaining four functions as a result of the duplex manner of the code-message dichotomy (see Jakobson 1971f[1957]), namely, that the metalanguage is an overlapping mode wherein the message refers to the code (see also Jakobson 1985e[1975]: 96). Even though it may seem quite obvious, Jakobson's point here should not be underestimated since, given the aforementioned formulation, he proposes to conceive metalanguage not as some sort of a more general and wider language or code, nor even as a code referring to itself (this would be, according to the logic of Jakobson's exposition, a circularity of proper names), but rather as a [|] reversed, complementary operation to what is understood as everyday communication. Not code as a constructional guide for creating messages, but message uncovering the constructional nature of the code. (Gvoždiak 2021: 63-64)

Naturally we cannot bypass the question of the duplex structures. The author has correctly identified two places in SW where these are explicitly treated. These are "Shifters, Verbal Categories, and the Russian Verb" (Jakobson 1957e), and a shorter notice in "The Fundamental and Specific Characteristics of Human Language" (Jakobson 1975), which is more like a recap. In the first is where I place, at least at my current state of knowledge, the birth of Jakobson's metalinguistic function. (Disproving this would be an increase in knowledge, and I'd be pretty happy to find him treating of metalanguage before 1957.) Much of it is pretty abstruse so I'll attempt a recap of my own. Let's start with the basics: "Both the message (M) and the underlying code (C) are vehicles of linguistic communication, but both of them function in a duplex manner; they may at once be utilized and referred to (= pointed at)" (1957e: 130), meaning that both can be referential objects (something pointed or referred to) and they can both be "utilized", presumably as the thing that does the referring/pointing. Thus, Jakobson distinguishes "circular" duplex structures, in which the same axis refers back to itself (M/M; C/C) and "overlapping" duplex structures, in which one axis refers to the other (M/C; C/M):

  • (M/C) - "a message may refer to the code" - "message referring to code" - autonymous mode of speech - ""Pup" means a young dog";
  • (M/M) - or a message may refer "to another message" - "message referring to message" - reported speech - "Ye have heard that hath been said [...] But I say unto you [...]";
  • (C/C) - "the general meaning of a code unit may imply a reference to the code" - "code referring to code" - proper names - "Alan";
  • (C/M) - or the general meaning of a code unit may imply a reference "to the message" - "code referring to message" - shifters - "I", "you".

Notice that "autonymous mode of speech" was the original name of the metalinguistic function. This he borrowed from Rudolf Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language (1937): "'(' is a symbolof the syntax-language which serves as a syntactical namefor that symbol in the object-language, and is, accordingly, nothing else than an abbreviation for the English words 'opening bracket'. When a symbol is used in this way as a name for itself (or, more precisely, as a name for its own symbol-design, we call it an autonymous symbol" (2007[1937]: 17). In §42 of the same book, he further clarifies that in the sentence "Omega is a letter of the alphabet" the first term is an "expression" and the statement that explains it is a "syntactical designation" (ibid., 156). In a further example, in the formulation "We substitute a + 3 for x; if a + 3 is a prime number, ..." "the expression 'a + 3' is used autonymously in the first case and non-autonymously in the second, namely (to put it in the material mode of speech), as thedesignation of a number." (ibid., 157). This, I take it (hopefully not too much off the mark), means that in the first instance the 'a + 3' is autonymous because it doesn't refer to anything other than itself - it is as-if a sign that stands for itself (recall Jakobson's introversive semiosis). It looks like here the take-away is that perhaps he substituted "metalinguistic" for "autonymous" because, strictly speaking, it is the object-language expression that is autonymous, or rather the mode in which an expression is used (without referral to something else), whereas in a metalinguistic operation the object-language expression must include the "syntactic designation". Now, a similar distinction is drawn by Jakobson, whose illustrations finally make some damn sense: "When we say, The pup is a winsome animal or The pup is whimpering, the word pup designates a young dog, whereas in such sentences as "Pup" is a noun which means a young dog, or more briefly, "Pup" means a young dog or "Pup" is a monosyllable, the word pup - one may state with Carnap - is used as its own designation" (Jakobson 1957e: 131). To put it bluntly in slightly modified form: "I like that puppy" is referential, because the word "puppy" refers to an extralinguistic object - a young dog; whereas "A puppy is a juvenile dog" is metalingual, because it is not referring to any particular puppy but the expression "puppy" itself, in which case the word "puppy" designates the intralinguistic object - the word "puppy" itself. Anticipating his theory of translation, the passage also already distinguises here between "intralingual (circumlocutions, synonyms) or interlingual (translation)" types, and gives a very general and concise formulation of the metalinguistic operation: "Any elucidating interpretation of words and sentences" (ibid., 131). Returning to the text at hand, I am somewhat baffled at what defining the metalingual function "without appeal to the remaining four functions" might mean. I don't know about defining, but it certainly appears to be a fairly autonomous (independent) function, based on the work of one specific other author, but so is the phatic function, and arguably poetic too. Yet, can you actually define the metalingual function without appeal to any of the other functions? How would you explain "message referring to code" without an appeal to the referential function? In my opinion this is unavoidable, and one could very well define the metalingual function as the introversive referential function, i.e. a special case of reference in with what an expression means is the object of reference, what is referred to. The rest I find equally problematic. That metalanguage is indeed "some sort of a more general and wider language or code" is defensible on the basis of the fringe argument that language is a system of subcodes and some subcode corresponds to every function. But this argument itself is problematic, requires substantiation. That metalanguage should not be conceived as "a code referring to itself" sounds like a red herring - that would indeed be C/C not M/C. What should be taken account here is the phraseology: in M/C and M/M there is an active component - the message does its "referring" by being explicated in speech; whereas with C/C and C/M we are dealing with a passive component - "the general meaning of a code unit" which implies a reference. To put it bluntly, the message explicates, the code implicates. In fact, I think these duplex structures could even be ordered according to this element of activity/passivity: C/C is completely inert - a name generally means nothing; C/M is more active, shifters find their meaning from the context, e.g. the participants in the communication event, but are still merely elements of a code; M/C is actively doing something, but it is activating the inter units of code; and M/M is the most active - referring to other messages in the context. This hinges on a perhaps not so solid premise that code is a sort of "being" (a storehouse of prefabricated units) while the message is a sort of "doing" (constructing a sequence from said units). How exactly metalingual operations should be understood as a complementary reversal "to what is understood as everyday communication" could have benefitted from further explication. My last quibble with this passage is that the "constructional guide" sentence is very well formulated and hints at the problem of metafunctionality that I've been harping on about, but where it slips is "the constructional nature of the code", which I think would pertain more to syntactics (the sequential construction of the message) than semantics (the proper domain of the code). I'd like to conclude this excursion into Jakobson's duplex structure by noting that this treatment by no means exhaust the possibilities that they present. For one, it would be nice if someone who fully understands Rudolf Carnap took a careful look at it and disentangled his own intentions, the object-language and syntactic designation ordeal, and how Jakobson transforms it. For another, it might be productive to dig deeper into the other duplex structures, particularly shifters, because there appears to be a strong dialectic between general and particular in it which might also be operative in the other duplex structures.

The universal communicative ability "involves the translation of the content of a message from one form to another" (Bradford 1994: 17). Similarly, building up metalingual sequences consists of translating from one form ("plucked") to another ("flunked"). (Gvoždiak 2021: 64)

Oh snap: Bradford, Richard 1994. Roman Jakobson. Life, Language, Art. London, New York: Routledge. [ESTER] Without reading Bradford this doesn't say much. I'm guessing that the expression is the "flunked" form and designation the "plucked" form?

Besides the dialogical aspect, the more fundamental requirement lies in the very possibility of performing the metalingual operations that they are dealing with and are based upon a sign or a sign-like unit. (Gvoždiak 2021: 64)

Again, not exactly sure what's going on here. Is this trying to say that for performing a metalingual operation we have to operate on language? I'm not sure that an "elucidative interpretation" could be performed on nonverbal signs or sign-like units and the procedure correcty called "metalinguistic".

Now, according to Jakobson, a sign "is bipartite and involves two aspects - one sensible [signans] and the other intelligible [signatum]" (Jakobson 1971b[1949]: 103). From this perspective, communication is a process of uttering chains of these sensible aspects that the addresser creates according to correlational rules provided by the linguistic code, whereas the addressee extracts their intelligible counterparts using the same means. From the viewpoint of formal sign definition, however, both parts co-create a principally inseparable and simultaneous sign unity, implying that without such unity they cannot be understood as signs or messages. (Gvoždiak 2021: 64)

Another head-scratcher. The gist of it is simple enough. The sender constructs a message thanks to his knowledge of the code and "The receiver understands the message thanks to his knowledge of the code" (Jakobson 1953d: 560). I'm not sure what exactly this bipartitioning the signum adds. Obviously message is on the side of the sensible signans and code on the side of the intelligible signatum. They stand, after all, for respective sides of Saussure's signifier/signified. A more interesting possibility is presented in the case where addresser and addresse do not share the code, such as the case of the cryptanalyst, in which case it looks like the addresser has the code and constructs the message, but on the other side the addressee receives the message and has to reconstruct the code. That is, the sender proceeds from intelligible (what he wants to say) to the sensible (how he says it), whereas the receiver proceeds from the sensible (what he heard) to the intelligible (what he thinks it meant). The real crux for me is whether this is a marginal boundary case, i.e. that of the cryptanalyst, or fundamentally the way all communication takes place. Trying to stay on topic, it could be said that the receiver experiences metalinguistic delay - he has to gauge the general meaning of the code units before can grasp the specific reference, whereas for the speaker, unless he suffers from loss of language (aphasia), there is no such delay - he has the freedom of putting any old code units he wishes to work in the construction of a message.

The communicative metalanguage is an analytical mode of the normal language that - in a way - makes sensible both sign aspects. Therefore, it can be stated that metalanguage does not occupy any higher level or a level "beyond" but, as it were, stretches the vertical sign unity of signans-signatum into a horizontal sequence which is not "ontologically" above but rather lifts the intelligible sign aspect back up to the same normal and familiar level. (Gvoždiak 2021: 64)

Unable to follow. Best that I can make out is that metalinguistic operations make both the signans and the signatum sensible - i.e. a metalingual utterance contains both the expression ("mare") and the designation ("the female of the horse"). But, then, wasn't the expression already sensible? And isn't the designation, too, another sensible? According to the principle of equivalence, how the whole thing works is by juxtaposing (concatenating, placing next to one another) two sensibles connected with the same intelligible. The spatial metaphors make no sense to me - presumably code selection involves a vertical axis because the they are simultaneously available for the speaker at the moment of speaking (he can select between "puppy", "dog", "canine", "man's best friend", etc.), and horizontal would be the combination of code units in a message, or the syntagmatic axis, which as-if rolls out linearly. What the "vertical sign unity" might be, I have no idea. Baffling stuff.

At first sight, the main difference between the scientific and communicative approach lies in the nature of the opposition which metalanguage forms in the framework of communication model. In its communicative aspects, the code counterpart is the message, or poetic function, whereas in the scientific aspect, it is the context, or referential function: the differentiation between object language and metalanguage. (Gvoždiak 2021: 65)

Uhh... What? The code counterpart of what? Communication? Okay, so, in metalanguage, the code itself is the message - okay, yeah, it is a message referring to code, as-if "materializes" the code, let's say, makes the intelligible sensible (problematic, as I've pointed out above). In scientific metalanguage, then, the... context is the message? Yeah, this is incomprehensible to me. I've read the sentence some umpteen times and still can't figure out what it's trying to say. It certainly sounds like something with a point but I just don't get it.

The mechanism for creating true statements as a basis for scientific metalanguage has to take into consideration the (Jakobsonian) context. According to the correspondence theory of truth, x is a true statement if it corresponds to a certain part of context/a fact. This view represents, for instance, Alfred Tarski's attempt to provide "a materially adequate and formally correct definition of the term 'true sentence'" (Tarski 1956: 152) and deserves a short commentary since Jakobson himself (Jakobson 1985f[1976]: 116-117) points out that the term "metalanguage" is a loan-translation from Polish and was introduced by Tarski. (Gvoždiak 2021: 65)

Recording this because the Tarski connection has always been obvious, close to the surface, but I don't think I had a proper citation: Tarski, Alfred 1956. The concept of truth in formalized languages. In: Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics. Papers from 1923 to 1938. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 152-278. "The investigation of formalized languages naturally demands a knowledge of the principles of modern formal logic" (Tarski 1956: 154), and that's my cue to close the book.

In contrast to the Tarskian logical approach, Jakobson's notion of the scientific metalanguage has to be (re)constructed from his pervading idea of semioticization of knowledge - that is to say, of striving to conceive every human behaviour, be it science or everyday communication, as involving some sort of transfer or exchange that relies upon (some sort of) signs. Moreover, in Jakobson's eyes, neither communicative nor scientific metalanguage are metaphysical entities; they are seen as complementary (see Jakobson 1971h[1959]: 262-263) and "real" manifestations of an underlying structure, the code. This is why Jakobson never pays much attention to the systematization of beliefs and intentions, nor to the concept of referent or denotatum. Although he claims that the initial phase of every communicative act lies in the intention of the sender, this phase, however, "is not yet open to a precise analysis" (Jakobson, Halle 1962[1956]: 487). (Gvoždiak 2021: 66)

Here I have little else to do than to provide the exact quotes cited: "An ability to speak a given language implies an ability to talk about this language. Such a "metalinguistic" operation permits revision and redefinition of the vocabulary used" (Jakobson 1959e: 262); "The initial stage in any speech event - the intention of the sender - is not yet open to a precise analysis. The same may be said of the nerve impulses sent from the brain to the effector organs" (Jakobson & Halle 1956a: 478).

Similarly, even though "the referent also belongs to linguistics" (Jakobson 1995: 320), there is no explicit evidence that this conception is anything more to Jakobson than a blurred word used in a rather arbitrary way. Likewise, Jakobson never uses the term "truth" in connection with sign meaning or the nature of science but, at the same time, is aware that some sort of validity is unquestionably requisite. (Gvoždiak 2021: 66)

That is a good point. So it does appear to be - the referent is as-if an afterthought. This source I'm not familiar with. I've met citations to it before, but now it turns out that it includes previously unpublished and newly translated material, too, and not just old papers with new titles: Jakobson, Roman 1995. Some questions of meaning. In: On Language. (Waugh, Linda R.; Monville-Burston, Monique, eds.) Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 315-323. [ESTER]

In Linguistics in relation to other sciences, Jakobson (1971l[1967]: 666) offers a three-level model of the sciences where the ground or central level is occupied by linguistics - that is to say, the study in communication of verbal messages. The second level, which also subsumes linguistics, is occupied by semiotics: the study in communication of all messages. The third, most general level then finally involves social anthropology and economics as studies in communication, which implies semiotics. According to this model, any of the more general approaches can be translated into the more concrete approaches; hence, anthropological statements can be translated into semiotic statements, which in turn can be translated into linguistic statements. This process, however, does not apply in the same manner in reverse. (Gvoždiak 2021: 67)

How did poetics, the fourth and innermost concentric circle, fall away? For a moment there I started thinking that I had somehow hallucinated poetics being the fourth circle, since the cited place (Jakobson 1969c: 666; cf. also p. 662 for the "concentric" aspect) does not mention it. Now I don't know where I got it from, but I definitely didn't hallucinate it: "Since some linguisticmessages have a poetic (aesthetic) function, poetics, the study of communication by poetic messages, is a subpart of linguistics, which encompasses the study of messages with any function" (Waugh 2021: 15). This downward-translatability aspect I hadn't even noticed. Jakobson's discussion of it is indeed there but it proceeds with many qualifications about making "language" metaphorical, and for me seems to discuss rather the concomitant role of language in economic transactions. After reading it over I'm still not sure if it really says that the statements of economics and social anthropology can be "translated" into semiotics, and thence to linguistics.

One such consideration can be found already in Phonology and [|] phonetics (Jakobson, Halle 1962[1956]: 475-477), where Jakobson and Halle propose the difference between the addressee as a decoder and the circumstantial observer (or researcher) as a cryptoanalyst. The principal distinction, according to Jakobson and Halle, lies in the fact that the first is in possession of the relevant instrument for decoding the obtained message, whereas the latter has only the message and must uncover the underlying principles that enabled the creation and understanding of the message, i.e., the code. The cryptoanalyst - as Jakobson and Halle suggest - must (re)construct the code from scratch. (Gvoždiak 2021: 67-68)

That good stuff. This is also where I realize that I've been misspelling "cryptoanalytic" (as "cryptanalytic"). How embarrassing. Or, they are interchangeable?

Jakobson's notion of communicative and scientific metalanguage are closely interconnected since both depend on the possibility of sign transfer or communication in a very broad sense. The most intrinsic stage of exchange/translation is occupied by (natural) languages and their ability to function in metalingual mode, i.e. to display the equative (sign) nature of metalingual operations (as discussed in the context of communicative metalanguage). This is also an epistemological dictum. Jakobson's idea of the semiotization of knowledge is nothing else than the belief that knowledge [|] is based not so much on a connection between the coded expression and an external object but rather on relation between signs. (Gvoždiak 2021: 68-69)

Very Peircean, in a way.

It may seem that communicative and scientific notions of metalanguage differ not in their respective nature or their methodological performance, but are rather based on the signs they are dealing with. Exactly of this kind is also Jakobson's (1971l[1967]: 690) noncommittal suggestion that the so-called exact sciences deal with indices upon which a (symbolic) code or a theory is imposed by physicists, whereas linguistics studies an already established "symbolic" code which is translated into metalanguage. This can serve as the basis (see also Holenstein 1976 59-60) for a proposed Jakobsonian classification of sciences: (1) two-part indexical sciences where only objects (facts of nature) and theories are involved, this semiotic approach deals with non-reversible exchanges; and (2) three-part communicative sciences - the said three parts being the message or the object language, the code of the sender, and the metalanguage of the researcher - which essentially depend upon "symbolic" signs and deal with reversible exchanges (as proven by change of the communicative roles). (Gvoždiak 2021: 69)

This discussion goes way over my head, but I have to note it down because the citation refers to a book T.B. mentioned recently in conversation: Holenstein, Elmar 1976. Roman Jakobson's Approach to Language. Phenomenological Structuralism. Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press. [ESTER]

Jakobson, unsurprisingly enough, is never quite clear about the exact nature of the code except for general claims such as that the code corresponds to "general laws governing all verbal systems" (Jakobson 1971a: 713). For this reason, Jakobson is being accused of "a confusing generalization by which the term code indicates both a syntactic system of purely differential units devoid of any meaning and a correlation of two series of elements systematically arranged term to term or string to string" (Eco 1986: 170). (Gvoždiak 2021: 71)

Yeah, I can agree to this. Yet, for me, this ambiguity is a productive one. It enables me to entertain the possibly egregious folly that functions correspond to subcodes, which really should be taken in the sense of distinctive features.

While the interpretation of the traditional sign trichotomy by means of this grid is probably acceptable, even though far from synonymous with Peirce's original, a possible objection has been raised against the nature of artifice. Andrews (1990: 58-64) pointed out the definitional weakness of artifice, for on the one hand, she disagrees with the conversion of Peirce's fundamentally triadic thinking into Jakobson's binaristic theory - i.e., she stresses the principal "divergence on dyadic and triadic oppositions" (Andrews 1990: 61), as well as the fact that the Peircean sign trichotomy underlies three types of logical inference, whereas none can be attached to Jakobson's fourth type. On the one hand, artifice, as Andrews suggests, has a totally different existence in comparison to the other three modes, since it is exactly artifice that is "connected to contextually-given signification" (Andrews 1990: 61) and therefore cannot be formulated invariantly, although this is a prerequisite for coded units. (Gvoždiak 2021: 73)

We're agreed that dividing Peirce's three categories of signs by imputation/factuality and similarity/contiguity is Jakobson's own attempt to make sense of him and not germane to Peirce. As to the latter part about the codification of artifice, I caught myself in the realization that artifice is truly the "creative" aspect of language - in Lotmanianan idiom, it is a device for creating "new information". On the other hand I'm not sure if it is wise to apply the category of "code" in Peirce's types of signs - is there an iconic code, indexical code, and symbolic code, in comparison with which artifice can be blamed of being uncoded?

The ambiguity and loss of importance of the exact code-message position in this type of approach appears more distinctively from the viewpoint of a similar idea proposed by Anderson (1998) in his A Grammar of Iconism. Anderson adds his own fourth type to icon, index and symbol - autology. What Anderson's "autology" shares with Jakobson's "artifice" is the feature of similarity (or tendency towards iconicity) and "reflexive self-reference" (Anderson 1998: 24). In what these conceptions differ is that autology - as a language-specific mode of signification - "mentions" rather than "uses" an expression (both terms as used by Quine). Examples of autology that Anderson presents - "Cleveland is a place name."; "Cleveland has seven [|] letters." etc. - clearly show that this mode is "a form of metalinguistic discourse" (Anderson 1998: 25). For Anderson, autology is a result of the descriptive power of language; for Jakobson, artifice is an appeal to the message itself, often accompanied by aesthetic/poetic values. (Gvoždiak 2021: 73-74)

Sounds exactly like Carnap's stuff (above), even the examples are similar: "Omega is a letter" and "'Omega' is not a letter but a word consisting of 5 letters". That "artifice is an appeal to the message itself" seems to confuse artifice and the poetic function.

By extension and generalization, this matrix can be understood as Jakobson's ultimate theoretical framework for understanding different types of semiosis. Although Jakobson never discusses it in this form, it would probably appear more or less as depicted in Fig. 2.
Reality / icon
(or referential/cognitive function)
Factual similarity		Science / index
(or causal function)
Factual contiguity
Poetry or Art / artifice
(or poetic function)
Imputed similarity		Language / symbol
(or metalingual function)
Imputed contiguity
This model (Fig. 2 [Framework of semiotic processes]) encapsulates several of Jakobson's attitudes toward the nature of communication, meaning and scientific effort. (Gvoždiak 2021: 74)

The causal function? "If language possesses certain formal ways of expressing causal relations, the ability to receive and transmit them has nothing whatsoever to do with the ability to apprehend causality as such" (Jakobson 1978d: 155). Maybe lumping together Peircean and Jakobsonian concepts this way is not the best idea?

On the other hand, Jakobson's (1971h[1959]: 265) cognitive/referential function of language corresponds to the indexical type of signification and seems to be quite independent from the language-based grammatical patterning. (Gvoždiak 2021: 75)

I'm not so sure. "Any referential holophrase or two-word phrase of both previous stages acted as a verbal appendage to the immediate situation and was correspondingly interpreted and labeled in the centenary scholarly tradition as a "psychological predicate" to an outward, hic et nunc observable and nonverbalized stimulus" (Jakobson 1975: 94). It looks to me that his treatment of this connection is quite thoroughgoing, if couched in unfamiliar terminology (I'm particularly irked by "nonverbalized").

Metalanguage is just a functional variety of the normal language, which at the same time means that the one and only truth that can be found in (human) communication is the "CODE-GIVEN truth" (Jakobson 1962: 650), which is also the way in which it should be studied. (Gvoždiak 2021: 78)

Punny! "The verbal code is a real property of any given speech community, and therefore the notorious linguistic controversy between the "hocus-pocus" position and the "God-given truth" is aimless. Any phonemic or grammatical opposition is neither fictional nor metaphysical, but simply and solely the CODE-GIVEN truth." (Jakobson 1962c: 650)

Rodríguez Higuera, Claudio Julio 2021. Never letting go: The search for semiotic universals from Jakobson to biosemiotics. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 81-94.

Taking into account Eco's assumption that "the entire history of philosophy could be re-read in a semiotic perspective" (Eco 1987: 109), some concessions have to be made with regards to space; therefore, for pragmatic reasons, the present work will be centred around three main axes: we will start with Jakobson's holistic assumptions about the sign, representative of a general semiotic theory that strives for unity, and one that makes the critical assumption that semiotics encompasses other areas of research into signification; this will be followed by Lotman's perspective on semiosis and culture as general aspects; and finally, some current biosemiotic developments on these problems will be taken into consideration to bring an actualized perspective on the issue. (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 82)

Awfully general. Gun to my head I couldn't say what were Jakobson's holistic assumptions about the sign.

Two different types of universals may be quickly identified for the purpose of this article: a methodological one and a metaphysical one. By methodological universal, I mean an applicable system of [|] categorization that can be used with no ontological constraints - a seemingly common feature of semiotic theory. This article will only refer to the latter - metaphysical universals - which can be considered as all the forms of laws and necessities postulated for and by the existence of semiosis. In this sense, Peirce's seminal work serves as the main axis for inquiries on the ontology of semiosis, and as such, different ways to understand his concepts will be reflected throughout the different possible alternatives to universals presented here. (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 82-83)

I'm starting to wonder why this paper is even in this collection.

Roman Jakobson provides a good starting point for general semiotics, that is, from the upper threshold - the more developed sign systems, so to speak. The disposition to look for universal principles that "govern the functioning of sign systems" has been "closely associated with the name of R. Jakobson" (Mayenowa 1967: 62), providing thus the necessary framework to start the exploration of specific semiotic universals. (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 84)

These more developed sign systems, I assume, mean language and (verbal) art. Mayenowa, Maria Renata 1967. Semiotics today: Reflections on the second international conference on semiotics. Social Science Information 6: 59-64. - "Semiotics encourages a particular type of intellectual orientation of great value: the predisposition to look for the universal principles which govern the functioning of sign systems, and which constitute an innate characteristic of all human creations. This orientation has strongly marked thesearch - closely associated with the name of R. Jakobson - for the universals underlying the formal and semantic structure of language, a search which has greatly contributed to revining interest in the nature of the relationship between the structure of natural languages and the structure of such artificial languages as logic and mathematics" (Mayenowa 1967: 62).

Jakobson recognizes general semiotics as "the whole theory of signs" encompassing linguistics (Jakobson 1981[1960]: 19), but this does not imply a specific hierarchy. (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 84)

Not sure if the downwards translatability (cf. Gvoždiak 2021: 67, above) is a feature of hierarchy or not.

The extension of Jakobson's work towards folklore and sketches on cognitive linguistics attains in binarism a theoretical engine (Nöth 1990: 76) for driving semiotic constructions. In fact, Eco concludes from Jakobson's work on folklore that "it is impossible to understand the [|] literary series without comparing it to the immanent laws of the other series, just as it is impossible to understand the laws of verbal language without considering their interaction with the laws of other semiotic systems" (Eco 1987: 112). What this means, though, is that for Jakobson there is something about semiotic systems that must correlate throughout different levels. (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 84-85)

Didn't Jakobson himself dabble in both folklore and cognitive linguistics? Not sure why the connection between literature and other semiotic systems is marked down as some brilliant conclusion by Eco when this is actually Jakobson's starting point: "The history of literature (art), being simultaneous with other historical series, is characterized, as is each of these series, by an involved complex of specific structural laws." (Jakobson & Tynjanov 1928d: 3) - that "there is something" seems odd, when the connection he has in mind is clearly that between language, literature, genres, styles, and their interrelated development. A sound shift in spoken language ultimately permeates the whole range of cultural products.

If we want to approach the topic through a more coherent vocabulary from current semiotics, it is important to notice that the 'fundamental convergences' of sign systems must be features of semiosis - the action of signs - and as such what needs to be assembled from Jakobson's personal repertoire is how information and communication play a role in the way signs are treated universally. Referring to Jakobson's possible model of semiosis, Krampen sees communication as the main feature of the model (Krampen 1997: 276), and this becomes evident in Jakobson's description of his own model (Jakobson 1981[1960]: 22). (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 85)

Weird. In "Linguistics and Poetics" (cited here), Jakobson very seldom uses the word "communication" without a qualifying "verbal" before it, and where he doesn't do so it is implied that he has speech in mind. It's almost like taking an expert in bicycles at his word when he talks about "wheeled vehicles", and applying it on automobiles (with an ensuing discussion on whether seatbelts hamper your balance).

Together with Jakobson's approach to information theory and his model of communication, we can clear up the main points of distinction: semiotic systems share some relevant properties related to communication in the sense of code and message, with binary oppositions at the core of all semiotic systems and their structures. Considering the "multiplicity of significative phenomena" (Jakobson 1985b[1975]: 205) as all things that may mean something, then the category of the semiotic is founded on a (fuzzy) principle of meaning for an interpreter. (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 87)

"Peirce's semiotic edifice encloses the whole multiplicity of significative phenomena, whether a knock at the door, a footprint, a spontaneous cry, a painting or a musical score, a conversation, a silent meditation, a piece of writing, a syllogism, an algebraic equation, a geometric diagram, a weather vane, or a simple bookmark" (Jakobson 1975g: 205). I would be very interested to know how one would apply Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions on "a silent meditation".

The literature reviewing the movement of ideas in the Tartu-Moscow school (evidently related to its main luminaries) is beyond the scope of this article, but indices accounting for the relevance of the relation between Jakobson and Lotman can be found, for instance, in Rudy 1986, Torop 2005 or Kull 2011 to name a few. (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 87; fn 11)

Within my ballpark. One of the more serious side-considerations with regard to Jakobson's Permanent Dynamic Synchrony is its family resemblance to Lotman's model of the semiosphere. Yet, the connection may not be direct but mediated by Russian Formalists, the Prague School, and so on.

  • Rudy, Stephen 1986. Semiotics in the U.S.S.R. In: The Semiotic Sphere. (Sebeok, Thomas A.; Umiker-Sebeok, Jean, eds.) New York: Plenum Press, 555-582.
  • Torop, Peeter 2005. Semiosphere and/as the research object of semiotics of culture. Sign Systems Studies 33(1): 159-173.
  • Kull, Kalevi 2011. The architect of biosemiotics: Thomas A. Sebeok and biology. In: Semiotics Continues to Astonish: Thomas A. Sebeok and the Doctrine of Signs. (Cobley, Paul; Kull, Kalevi; Petrilli, Susan, eds.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 223-250.
However, Lotman also states that "every semiotic system (or language) has a hierarchical structure" (Lotman 1990: 50). The possible set of universal properties of semiotic systems in Lotman's thought can be described as communication, memory and creativity (M. Lotman 2002: 35), surprisingly being more exact a group of constituents than what can be extracted from Jakobson's thought on general semiotic systems. (Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 88)

And this "hierarchical structure" I see as part of PDS. See Jakobson's "The Dominant" (1971f[1934]), which was republished at Tartu in 1976 (cf. Černov ed., Хрестоматия по теоретическому литературоведению 1).

Chavez Barreto, Eugenio Israel 2021. A small note on phonology and semiotics, à propos the influence of Roman Jakobson in Luis Prieto's Fonología del español moderno. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 95-108.

It may happen, as it does in phonology, that the objective identity attributed to a thing can "factor" into properties, or features. For Prieto, if a given feature of a given sound is relevant for the sign system, then the realization, or the instantiation, of that sound must present such feature; if the given feature is not relevant, then the realization can either present it or not. As one of his famous examples goes (Prieto 1975: 85 n.11), since in Spanish there is no difference between [s] and [z], while the difference is relevant, and gives place to two different phonemes in French, a French speaker cannot cognize [s] as /z/ (eg. French [pwasõ] 'fish' vs. French [pwazõ] 'poison'), but a Spanish speaker can cognize [z] as /s/ (e.g. "rasgo", phonetically: [razgo], but phonologically /rasgo/). From this it follows that features are "relational". What is meant by "relational" in this text is the fact that every feature implies its "correlative" feature. And inasmuch as it is "relational", a feature can only be a cognitive construction (Prieto 1988). (Chavez Barreto 2021: 97)

I've heard that Finnish people have a similar difficulty with distinguishing bear and pear. Jakobson's mere otherness comes to mind.

The relationship between Luis Prieto and Roman Jakobson is difficult to assess. Throughout Prieto's works, there are only a few references to Jakobson's works (most of them are to phonological works), yet, in a programmatic article from 1987, Prieto states that Jakobson's theories have been among his main sources of inspiration (Prieto 1987: 11). The small amount of references to Jakobson could be to some extent surprising, given that references to Trubetzkoy, another one of Prieto's main theoretical sources tightly linked to Jakobson, are a constant in the majority of his texts. (Chavez Barreto 2021: 98)

A perennial problem with Jakobson. One I had to confront especially with Gardiner and Ruesch - Jakobson cites both numerous times but as-if not where he should.

Perhaps one of Prieto's most significant references to Jakobson, is a brief comment on Jakobson's six functions, in the introduction to Pertinence et pratique:
Les multiples fonctions "linguistiques" que R. Jakobson distingue dans "Linguistique et poétique" [...], ou bien se réduisent à la communication (par example, la fonction "phatique" attribué a la phrase Dites, vous m'écoutez? [...]), ou bien ne sont pas des fonctions propres de la structure sémiotique constituée par la langue, mais, plutôt, des fonctions que des objets intervenant dans la langue, à savoir, les sons, assument du fait qu'ils interviennent aussi dans d'autres structures sémiotiques (par exemple, celle qui permit à la gesticulation verbale de l'acteur du théâtre Stanislavski de [|] Moscou de faire reconnaître à l'auditoire quarante situations émotionnelles différentes [...]). (Prieto 1975: 10 n5)
In this text, however, we will not deal with the criticism Prieto makes of Jakobson's six functions. (Chavez Barreto 2021: 98-99)

If Google Translate didn't mess up too bad, it looks like Prieto's complaint against Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions are not functions of the semiotic structure of language but functions of the objects that intervene [?] in language, namely, sounds. The point, I take it, is something similar to my own frequent quibble that the scheme of linguistic functions is not a model of communication but rather illustrate the tasks that various forms of language can perform. Moreover, Prieto also seems to be aiming at the same thing I've hypothesized - that the proper objects of said functions are not words or messages but speech sounds - features (e.g. emotive function carried by physiognomic features, phatic function carried by contoural features, etc.).

Let us finish these observations by noting that when it comes to Jakobson's references to Prieto, it seems that they are nonexistent, which is surprising, to say the least. It is a fact that Jakobson knew about Prieto, let us remember that Principes de Noologie was edited in the series Janua Linguarum, and let us remember that Alarcos Llorach included Prieto's works on the bibliography of his Fonología del Español which Jakobson certainly knew. The most important piece of evidence we have for affirming that the two linguists were well aware of each othre is that at the library of the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, where a part of Prieto's books and documents are deposited, there are several offprints of Jakobson's articles dedicated to Prieto. (Chavez Barreto 2021: 99)

The author mentioned this, too, in personal communication. I'd add that lack of citation is not completely reliable with Jakobson, and he may have employed Prieto somewhere in some measure without giving credit.

The pertinent features of the phonological word and the phonological syllable are considered as "phonic points" that are successive in time (Prieto 1953: 5, Prieto 1954). The pertinent feature of the intonation unit is a melodic curve; however, Prieto states that the thesis will not be concerned with that level of analysis. (Chavez Barreto 2021: 101)

Sounds like the contoural feature.

Griffin, Jonathan 2021. Communal resonance of meaning as seen through Lotman, Jakobson, and Peirce. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 109-131.

Nevertheless, in reality these two ways of seeing may often simply be the result of different focuses. For those who experience some dissonance or tension between semiotic models that emphasize either a dyadic and triadic relation, we may yet be able to describe an outlook and an approach that includes both dimensions at a general level of understanding and analysis. After all, triadic models seem to be primarily concerned with the nature of the sign itself - the sign as such, anywhere it might appear. These models are likely to point out that a purely dyadic relation is insufficient to form the full basis of semiosis or, correlatively, of the sign itself. Close analysis and consideration have affirmed rather than undermined this conclusion, and biosemiotics in particular seems to find a dyadic sign model too anemic in comparison with its more robust triadic counterpart. (Griffin 2021: 109)

Conciliatory. Indeed, dyadic "semiology" typically focuses on various "languages", where the intelligible side is in a sense just as pre-fabricated as the sensible side: you can look the definition of a word up in a dictionary. Whereas nonlinguistic (nonverbal) signs don't typically have an agreed-upon signification unless they are part of some system (e.g. road signs, folk nowledge of "body language", etc.). The triadic model is more focused upon guesswork and probabilities - as illustrated by Peirce's "interpretant" and the lack of the final object.

Deely's concern is that even though "[s]emiotics does not fit the modern paradigm", "[s]emiology is ultramodern" and advances an "ultramodern project of signs [...] without really overthrowing the comfortable, deep assumptions of modern epistemology" (Deely 2001: 685). He argues that this amounts to a radical extension of modern idealism, losing touch with the object signified (Deely 2001: 682), with the biological and biosemiotic nature of human semiosis (Deely 2001: 680), and even with sensation itself - despite the fact that the "human use of signs without sensation would be impossible" (Deely 2001: 683). (Griffin 2021: 110)

I'm getting flashbacks to Stephen Hicks' wild claim that Immanuel Kant was the first postmodern philosopher because he was the first (lol) philosopher to postulate the inaccessibility of the object (the thing-in-itself) or something like that.

A source of tension that seems to arise commonly in semiotics today, whether justified or not, is over which kind of relations are more important: dyadic or triadic. This tension does not always seem to be explicitly articulated, but it still surfaces within discourse (often implicitly) between individuals, groups, or schools. One [|] way to track this divergence is that often semioticians tend to identify most closely with either Peirce or Saussure (or the intellectual descendants of one or the other). We see not only different basic concepts of the sign itself but also different methodological approaches which follow attentively. Already this is seen in the work of these two thinkers themselves. Surely we do not need to belabour the point. (Griffin 2021: 115-116)

Curiously, the situation is very similar with phaticity. Here, Malinowski represents the triadic and Jakobson the dyadic approach. This is because Malinowski reacted to Ogden and Richards and their presentation of Peirce's triadic logic, which is why you'll find a page in Malinowski's essay where he even fumbles with triangles. Jakobson, on the other hand, continued Sausssurean dyadic thinking with the concepts of code and message, where - if one were to force other functions into the scheme of duplex structures - the poetic function represents a type of message in which the message as-if creates its own code, and the phatic function a type of message which is nothing more than a realization of the code ("Hello" and "Goodbye" not only do not refer to anything, they represent the least creative subset of the linguistic code - what Otto Jespersen called "set phrases"). The exact nature of Malinowski's triadism deserves careful study in itself because in my opinion he employs it even independently of the Peircean influence by drawing on the psychological triad of sensation/emotion, volition/action, and cognition/reference.

Lotman gives us a theoretical basis for dyadic analysis, and Jakobson affirms this [|] theoretical basis and executes it even while understanding himself to function within a Peircean framework of signs. (Griffin 2021: 116-117)

The order should in my opinion be in reverse. I think Lotman gained a lot from Jakobson, and Jakobson's theories appear to "affirm" Lotman because they are based on his.

Lotman (1977: 34) goes on to say that "both a sign and its content can be conceived of only as structural chains linked by certain relations". The emphasis is on the necessarily communal and relational situation of the sign. (Griffin 2021: 117)

For a long while I read "relation" always implying "social relations". This changed with my reading of Locke. Now whenever I meet the word "relation" what comes to mind is mereology: "For our Ideas of Extension, Duration, and Number, do they not all contain in them a secret relation to the Parts?" (Locke 1741a: 190) - a simple illustration being the kind of (what we today might call) conceptual analysis he performs on words, e.g. the word "husband" brings together the idea of man, and relation to another person (husband to a wife). In this way, according to Locke's logic, every complex idea can be broken down into simple ideas and relations between the latter, the whole thing amounting to a kind of mereology (relations between parts and wholes).

He says immediately after this description that when "one element is recoded into another, different element, a correspondence is established where one element in its own system is seen as equivalent to the other in its system" (Lotman 1977: 35). He has purposefully chosen the geometrical framework to express his concept of meaning. It is that which survives translation, that which is preserved when viewed in a different plane. This is why he says that "the problem of content always involves the problem of recoding" (Lotman 1977: 35). (Griffin 2021: 118)

Quite similar to Jakobson's translationism.

So how does this help us? Well, first of all we must see that while the intersection of two planes is a dyadic relation, it is a relation of two complexes rather than a relation of two isolated elements, such as a 'signifier' and a 'signified'. That is, 'chain structure' already implies a plurality - namely, a complex involving multiple constituent elements. The choice of plane is significant in this respect, for a plane is comprised of multiple points; even more significant, perhaps, is the fact that at least three points are needed in order to create a plane (and of course here we find more resonance of Peircean logic). With only two points, one can never have more than a line (segment). (Griffin 2021: 119)

This discussion will most definitely add something how I read the word "plane" in Lotman. It makes some very intuitive sense with regard to the axis of selection - when choosing what word to employ, we have to select it with regard to both the signified (to select among similar concepts) and signifier (with regard to which synonymous word would best fit the context).

He also makes clear that defining this problem of meaning in general is necessary in order to know what artistic meaning (his object of analysis) is. He tells us that we must understand "the 'meaning' of meaning [...] if we are to understand the content of art, its role in society and its connection to the non-artistic aspects of human activity" (Lotman 1977: 32). (Griffin 2021: 119)

An illustration of "the correlation between the literary series and other historical series" (cf. Waugh 2021: 23-24; Rodríguez Higuera 2021: 84-85; infra).

Roman Jakobson, on the other hand, is a good (even if not perfect) example of how this balance can be achieved. His work in linguistics was carried out with an eye toward semiotics as a broader enterprise. While he generally seemed to employ a simple dyadic, comparative, parallel approach such as we have been discussing, nevertheless he saw himself as working to extend and apply some of Peirce's basic semiotic foundations. For this reason, Jakobson is a beneficial voice to include here. His attitude toward Peirce resembles that of John Deely toward both Peirce and Poinsot: that if the world had paid attention earlier, the landscape of thought would likely be quite different and much better. (Griffin 2021: 124)

I was just thinking that this paper is coming to a close and it hasn't considered Jakobson at all. I've also been thinking - catalyzed by the Burke's "pentadic relation [between] act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose" (ibid, 124) - that Jakobson's scheme wouldn't be "sextadic": from my perspective it rather looks like a mixture of triadic (the organon base) and dyadic (the duplex structures). This realization got me thinking if it could yield anything interesting if his so-called dyadic aspects were forced into triadic relations. Say, take the duplex structures of overlapping and circular relations between code and message, and include contact, too. I'll have to think about how that might work out.

Jakobson often enough presented Peirce's views even while noting those of Saussure, placing emphasis on and expressing preference for the former rather than the latter. (Griffin 2021: 125)

Again, I would have reversed the order - to me it looks like he is imposing, if not Saussure, then adjacent ideas from Prague, on Peirce. Jakobson's interpretation of the icon/index/symbol triad as a hierarchy is an illustration of this.

Puumeister, Ott 2021. The autonomy of the aesthetic function. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 132-148.

In "What Is Poetry?", a text from the early 1930s, Roman Jakobson takes a rather defensive stand in response to certain critics and "detractors": "Neither Tynjanov nor Mukařovský nor Šklovskij nor I - none of us has ever proclaimed the self-sufficiency of art. [...] What we stand for is not separation of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function" (Jakobson 1981a[1933-1934]: 749-750). (Puumeister 2021: 132)

A poignant distinction. Recall the tidbit that has passed through these notes at least three times already, that the literary series is connected to other series. Art does not happen in a vacuum. Verbal art is no more self-sufficient with regard to other uses of language than emotion is with regard to thought and action. By the autonomy of the aesthetic function what he had in mind is stated explicitly in "Linguitics and Poetics", that the poetic function is dominant in poetry but present in a subordinated manner in other uses of language, including the scientific (referential).

And this constant dynamism, the elusiveness of the aesthetic function, leads us to follow the path of philosophy, on which the aesthetic function transforms into a sort of potentiality for artistic creation. Instead of an object of analysis, it is posited as a condition of possibility for creativity as such. We will see, then, that the autonomy of the aesthetic function cannot be reduced, in fact, to existing artistic forms, but is instead related to explosive and innovative processes of culture - in Juri Lotman's terminology. (Puumeister 2021: 133)

I've been skirting around this question with the discussion of artifice, above. More so than (Peirce's) other categories of signs, which are determined by similarity, contiguity, and habit (in this case, imputed contiguity), artifice (in the sense of imputed similarity) is the realm of (linguistic) creativity, the condition of possibility to transform pre-exiting semiotic relations into something new. Thus, I read it like this: the aesthetic function cannot be reduced to existing artistic forms because these are past and present, whereas artifice, like the symbol, is oriented towards the future. This difference in temporal orientation may be taken as the crux of the distinction between imputed and factual.

To end this criminally short introduction here, we can say that Roman Jakobson and Juri Lotman both conceive of the aesthetic function's philosophical aspect in terms of the operations of the Kantian genius, who has the ability to constitute its own rules (with freedom from conventional rules) according to nature's original creativity. And this makes it quite clear that no fixed principles of study can do justice to the 'spirit of art' - which is why, with Lotman, we see that the main focus of the construction of the artistic text is, in fact, on the lifting of rules and constructing new languages, which cannot be described by ready-made methodologies. (Puumeister 2021: 134)

In a word, innovation.

Before turning to the aesthetic function as an object of analysis, we should specify what exactly is meant when we use the terms 'aesthetic function', 'poetic function', and 'function of art'. On a meta-level, they all signify the fundamental property of human creativity, the potentiality for novelty [|] and the production of new languages. On this level, they can be taken almost synonymously. However, when speaking of the 'poetic function', it is clear that Jakobson reverses it for linguistic phenomena, but it is generalizable to 'aesthetic function' and in this sense it is not categorically different from the latter. (Puumeister 2021: 134-135)

This becomes very clear in the writings of Jan Mukařovský - poetic is merely a subset of the aesthetic. The poetic function is the aesthetic function of language.

Formalist poetics, it could be said, examines the way artistic texts are formed, examines their principles of formation: "For them, the form reveals all the aspects, all the parts of the work, but it exists solely as a relation between elements, of elements in a work, of a work in national literature, etc.; in brief, it is an ensemble of functions" (Todorov 1965: 66). (Puumeister 2021: 135)

"Ensemble" is a more neutral way to express "hierarchy". The particular formation of the ensemble/hierarchy of functions would be, in formalist terminology, the constitutive device of a particular artist, school of art, area or time period, etc. That is, it is the way of doing things, analysed in terms of functions (what particular parts are supposed to do, and how they do it, in order to achieve the overall intended effect).

Formalist poetics faces us with the problem: What is the uniqueness common to poetry? Could we find some element of organization that is shared by all poems and used by all poets? Moreover, this element must define and structure the proper object of analysis of poetics. Tzvetan Todorov (1987: 24-25) explains that this line of questioning is what makes the formalists "true innovators" because it allows "them to put into practice [|] [...] a new science of discourse. [...] a discipline whose object is the forms of discourse rather than individual works". How is this discourse formed? It is structured around a notion that Jakobson (1981a[1933-1934]: 750) calls 'poeticity' which, compared to the transience of poetry, is "an element sui generis, one that cannot be mechanically reduced to other elements". Poeticity, instead, organizes and structures the relations between other elements (in the message, in the text). (Puumeister 2021: 135-136)

Simply: the focus is not on what has been done that is called art, but on how what is called art is done. With verbal art, poetry can be compared to other forms of verbal discourse. The primary point of contrast, as with any other art, is the utilitarian - art is beautiful, not useful. Thus, Russian formalists opposed poetic language (which amounts to the same thing as the use of languge with a dominant poetic function) to practical language or everyday language (which amounts to the referential function in Jakobson's later scheme - although the conative may be "practical" and the emotive may be "everyday", this identification revolves around the purportedly widespread identification of communication as such with the referential function (cf. Waugh 2021: 20; above), or transmission of information in another parlance). In other words, "prose" is the baseline with which poetry is compared.

In Jakobson's famous description of functions of language (Jakobson 1960: 353-356) each function, except the poetic, focuses the message toward something other than itself. In the case of the first five functions, the message becomes transparent, that is, it is merely a medium for conveying something else. Hence, the poetic function is a rapport of elements such that the message becomes sensible (and not that something else becomes sensible through the message). (Puumeister 2021: 136)

Damn good. Here the "focus", the Einstellung I problematized above (cf. Waugh 2021: 20), makes good sense, semiotically. Indeed, the poetic function foregrounds, as the preferred term in formalist glossary goes, the message itself - it draws the addresse's attention towards how the message is constructed. Specifically, it draws attention to the "form" of the message - which is to say its syntactic/syntagmatic sequence, the order in which code units are placed, how long the various parts of speech are, where the pauses are placed (e.g. given the correct measures of syllables, any utterance can become a haiku), etc. Ordinarily, in what is broadly called "prose", these aspects of the message are indeed "transparent" in a sense - they are in the background, but the poetic function calls attention to them, makes them the object of appreciation, rather than what the message is about (emotive, conative, referential, etc.). (Doesn't this sound even vaguely "gestaltish"?) But here I can yet again practice my "metafunction" routine (cf. notes to Gvoždiak 2021: 62-63; above). There is a fairly clear line of demarcation that can be drawn between the three first primary organon functions and Jakobson's additional metafunctions: the first are extralinguistic and the other three are intralinguistic. That is, emotive, conative and referential functions refer to factors that are constitutive of the communicative situation: the first person speaker, the second person listener, and the third person or object talked about. In the emotive function, the message refers to the emotional state of the speaker; in the conative function, the message refers to the desired actions of the listener; in the referential function, the message refers to someone who is not participating in the dyadic exchange (s/he could be present, but is "objectified" by the message) or some other object within the situation or in the universe of discourse ("context" sensu stricto). The speaker, listener, and object are not part of the message. The other three factors (message, code, and contact) on the other hand are part of the message itself (or, if more generalized, the sign itself). What makes their correspondant functions "meta" is that they refer to aspects of the message itself: its syntactic aspect (message), semantic aspect (code), and pragmatic aspect (contact). This idea was catalyzed by Griffin (above): the duplex structures ("overlapping" code and message and their respective "circularities" - cf. Gvoždiak 2021: 63-64; above) appear singularly dyadic, yet there is nothing barring us from treating them triadically in conjunction with the extralinguistic factors (explaining this I think I've managed to put off thus far, so as not to give absolutely everything away, but we'll see if I can hold off until the end of the book). The coherence of this point really hinges on the phatic function and its idiosyncracies in Jakobson's "Linguistics and Poetics" (when compared to Malinowski's phatic communion). Specifically, it involves the way "contact" is widely interpreted - as a synonym for "medium" (cf. even Waugh 2021: 20). On the one hand, this expansion of "contact" to include "medium" appears extraneous because Jakobson himself never uses the word "medium" in that way - the only medium he is interested in is "the medium of language" (Jakobson 1967e: 103), and in his usage it appears only when one particular language mediates between others, e.g. "Slavonic vocabulary [...] has influenced Polish ecclesiastical terminology through the Czech medium" (Jakobson 1943a: 451), or what basically amounts to elevating language as the "primary modelling system" in TMS terminology: "in the ensemble of cultural phenomena [language] functions as their substructure, groundwork, and medium" (Jakobson 1969c: 664). On the other hand, despite him never using "medium" in the sense of multiple modalities, the connection was in place even before him, as I point out in my own paper in this volume: "What media of communication are used?" is the question which, according to Jurgen Ruesch, addresses the factor of contact, and all-in-all, "medium" is a quite suitable synonym for Jakobson's "physical channel": whether you hear (vocal), see (written), or touch (braille) the verbal message to receive it. This may have been a long walk for a short drink of water but what I'm aiming at is that the medium qua physical channel is an intrinsic aspect of the message. I'll have to look again into what little can be scraped together from Selected Writings on this particular point at a later date to continue theorizing further, but where this discourse is heading is expanding his duplex structures into triplex structures. I can already see an "autonymic" problem on the horizon: none of the terms involved - contact, channel, and medium - can be abbreviated for this purpose (both C and M are already taken). A suitable candidate for this purpose might be P - referring to either phatic, physical (channel), or pragmatic (aspect). Whether or not "pragmatic" is suitable is another question: on the one hand it would be a nice coincidence if Charles Morris' syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic could be superimposed on message, code, and contact, but as my own paper in this volume hints at with the lack of the "effect" factor, the actual "pragmatics" of Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions is a complex and largely uninvestigated issue - his particular logic of means and ends in language make all of his functions appear pragmatic in a sense (they're all focused on how humans use signs). I could dance the night away on this topic alone, but I have to point out another interesting implication in this passage: that the poetic function makes the message (itself) sensible is quite loaded, given the opposition between sensible, sensuous, perceptible signans and the intelligible, translatable signatum (cf. Gramigna 2021: 36; infra). A curious possibility presents itself here: given the (perhaps metaphorical or -nymical) identification between sensible/message and intelligible/code and the Latin terms signans and signatum, I wonder if it would be permissible to convolute the phatic function even further and make "contact" stand for the "phono-semantic knot" of signans and signatum, that is, for signum itself. This would only be possible, I think, from the perspective which identifies the phatic function with the "fact of communication" (this comment is already too long to get into that), i.e. focused not the material form of the sign ("message") or the intellectual content of the sign ("code"), but the very fact of whether or not there is or is not a sign to begin with. In any case, Puumeister's phraseology for the hierarchy of functions as "a rapport of elements" is amazing on its own: the imputed similarity of artifice indeed establishes a kind of harmonious relationship between the units of code employed in the construction of a poem.

Of course, as Jakobson (1960: 353) says, there never has existed a message which is structured solely on one single function: "The diversity lies not in a monopoly of some of these several functions but in a different hierarchical order of functions. The verbal structure of a message depends primarily on the predominant function." If every message contains the operations of all the six functions (although most of them in a supressed state), then the poetic function is not the only one present in poetry nor is the poetic function found only in poetry. This enables Jakobson to maintain that what is specific to poetry lies outside poetry and is, as such, universalisable. (Puumeister 2021: 136)

Practice makes perfect. Let's go over the function-metafunction distinction again. The aspect I have not yet fully explicated, because it still feels a bit too convoluted, is the pairing of functions with metafunctions. There is a not uninteresting but for my purposes almost completely unproblematic connection between the emotive/expressive and poetic functions. Naturally not all poetry is an artistic expression of emotion but this relationship has been examined so thoroughly by great minds that explicating it, if necessary, requires no great effort on my part. The connection between the conative and the metalingual functions on the other hand has appeared more and more problematic. My earlier theory was that the metalingual and conative functions pair well because their factors do so quite well in the cryptanalytic model: the speaker has the code and constructs a message, and the listener(-observer) first receives the message and has to reconstruct the code, in a sense, in which case his work with the code is more metalingual than the sender's. The question here lies with whether one takes the cryptanalytic model to be the norm or the exception. This is yet to be determined on the basis of Jakobson's own writings, and the way I currently see it it could go either way. Likewise, I've proposed (to someone in personal communication) that there is a natural connection between the conative and metalingual functions because metalingual operations, like conative utterances, are oriented towards the addressee: one has to explain one's use of words to another, not oneself (the speaker has to know the meaning of the words s/he's using). The foregoing discussion of metalanguage in this post seems to refute this notion because, according to Jakobson, metalingual operations can also be self-directed (autocommunicative), as in Anthony's presleep soliloquis or the examples where the child wonders out loud if two words or expressions are similar or dissimilar. This problem could possibly be overcome with the aid of a thorough typology of metalingual operations, but I see no such thing forthcoming in the near future. The connection between the phatic and referential functions is the most problematic one of all (phaticity is of course endlessly problematic for me). On the one hand, in the visualization of the cryptanalytic model, the main import of that paper I wish to write, contact and context are opposed and thus connected, and this seems only natural: the referential function pertains to informative speech, the phatic function to uninformative speech. One could also instigate some convoluted quasi-philosophical arguments as to why they should be opposed (phatic utterances or set phrases lack context, etc.), but I haven't yet made any significant steps in that direction. Where the overall difficulty lies is the more logical pairing of metalingual with referential and phatic with conative. I'll begin with the latter so as to circle back to the passage at hand with the former. At issue is, once again, the inherent sparsity and ambiguity of Jakobson's phatic function. By introducing the element of "attention" to phaticity - which was not there in Malinowski's phatic communion (at least in this technical a sense; Malinowski's treatment of this element is social-psychological in nature, as I've discussed in Estonian: his is more like monopolizing the attention of fellow interlocutors, not merely maintaining or prolonging the communicative situation, i.e. not prolonging the overall exchange but one's own turn to speak at the cost of others' turns) - he effectively devalued the conative function. Is the vocative not calling for attention? Confusion on this matter is fairly frequent in linguistic studies that employ Jakobson's functions (I have gathered some examples). It might have been better if Bühler's "Appell" would have remained the addressee-oriented function. In any case, I'll have to deal with this issue elsewhere. The most important connection here is between metalingual and referential. Are all of the six functions actually operative in every linguistic message? The primary ones undoubtedly: every linguistic message is the addresser's expression and emotive valence can even be found in the very selection of code units, if need be. Every message also has an intended addressee, even if it is a virtual one (God and other inanimate or non-existent objects). Likewise with referential - even completely meaningless nonsense has some reference, be it intrinsic or reflexive. The primary functions are undoubtably there in every linguistic message. Amongst the "metafunctions", the case can be made for both poetic and phatic. Poetic we've already covered (cf. Waugh 2021: 21, above). The phatic function is also necessarily present if it is confused with the conative in the above-mentioned manner (every message requires attention even by the very fact of being a message). But now, what of the metalingual? Can you find something metalingual in absolutely every message? Even in the loosest sense, including autonymic expressions or whatever, I don't think this is true. Unlike the other five, there is seemingly nothing "universalisable" in the metalingual function. It is also the only function that cannot be transposed on nonverbal forms of communication - by very definition, a verbal instruction as to the interpretation of a nonverbal message would not be "metalinguistic". To conclude this comment, I think that either the metalinguistic function is the sole exception that cannot be universalised or some unbeforeseen theoretical acrobatics are necessary to justify its universality. Both outcomes are interesting in themselves.

The poetic function is thus localizable everywhere in language, but where it assumes a dominant position, we find poetry proper. Thus, it is plausible to speak of the 'poetry of everyday language' and not refer to accepted forms of poems. And here we come back to the problem of form: how to describe the universal and ahistorical form (or the operation of formation) of poetry? What does the autotelism (see Todorov 1987) of poetry mean in scientific terms, and how are we to analyse this poetic self-referentiality? In the case of Jakobson, we can discover two principal operations of the poetic function: 1) bringing to the fore "the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects" (Jakobson 1985a[1976]: 116), and 2) the projection of "the principle [|] of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination" (Jakobson 1960: 358). (Puumeister 2021: 136-137)

Very fine wording. I'd draw particular attention to "localizing", which foregrounds the question of "parts of speech", so to say, which carry/assume the poetic function: in a non-poetic setting, only some part of the whole (utterance/message/text) may manifest the function - I was about to write have poetic quality, though the correct term in that case would probably be "value". A minuscule quibble: "everywhere in [the use of] language" - but I'm a stickler for the code/message distinction, the point is sufficiently clear. I also like the word "assuming" because it implies some dynamism ("carrying" not so much). The "autotelic" aspect hits a nail I haven't seen being hit so much in poetics, which is very typical in phatics, that poetry, too, is in a sense an end-in-itself - this highlights the aspect that providing aesthetic enjoyment is not a universal property of poetry, that some people write poems not to please (others) but because there is some pleasure to be had in the construction (rather than reception) of a poem. I'm not sure if Jakobson distinguishes between these - probably not, because (to my knowledge) he doesn't involve such communication-theoretical trivialities in his poetics. Poetic self-referentiality on the other hand is not as interesting; in my experience treatments of the poetic function that associate it with self-referentiality are the poorest ones. Does the poem really refer to itself? In my opinion "self-referentiality" gives off the false impression that poems are meaningless, which is absolutely not the case. Truly self-referential poems, i.e. a poem about writing said poem, sound like an exception, or the dabblings of a novice. But, since I don't really read poetry, I'm not competent to judge - movies about making movies are very common, usually a sign of lacking ideas (like Newly Single, 2017), unless historical and really well done (like Mank, 2020). That is, I don't think "self-referentiality" really captures the point of the poetic function, and additionally it is just a bit frustrating that the self-referentiality of the message does not amount to the duplex structure of message referring to message (reported speech)- understandably, the object referred to would have to be the very same message, and this does not fit, in my opinion, with the nature of the poetic function: I would not protest if instead of self-referentiality it were possible to put into as many syllables a concept that would go something like implicit-reference-to-method-of-construction. That is, I don't think referentiality really fits in here, a poem does not explicitly refer to its own construction (at least it's not a neccessary condition of a poem to do so) but to call attention to its construction by its very construction itself: you see a text formatted with regular line breaks, possibly with lines ending with words that rhyme, and understand, this is a poem; most poems don't begin with words this is a poem, it is implied by the paratext (the way the text is constructed and/or formatted). In any case, distinguishing these "two principal operations of the poetic function" is an achievement. I wouldn't have thought of distinguishing these. It almost seems that in conjunction they would constitute the Peircean triad: the "projection" as a relation between representamen and interpretant, and "foregrounding" as a relation between the interpretant and object. Then again, there's a nagging suspicion that due to Jakobson's preferred dyadism these are merely two equally valid ways to treat the "phono-semantic knot": sign=combination & object=selection. That is, one's dressed in Peircean garb (sign/object) and the other in Saussurean (selection/combination).

It is of course a fundamental understanding within semiotics that a sign cannot be identical to the object it conveys. (Puumeister 2021: 137)

This fundamental understanding is broken by both Jakobson and Lotman in ""the use of things as signs" that "may be illustrated by the exhibition and compositional arrangement of synecdochic samples of shop goods in show windows" (cf. Jakobson 1970d: 702; in Gramigna 2021: 51). This is what I frequently call intrinsic coding: "An intrinsic code is in a sense no code in that the act does not stand for but is its significant; the meaning of the act is instrinsic to the action itself" (Ekman & Friesen 1969: 60). Gramigna calls it ostensive semiosis (cf. Gramigna 2016).

Saussure (2011: 67) understood the sign as a constitutive and arbitrary relation between the signifier (signifiant) and the signified (signifié) - a sign would not exist apart from that relation. (Puumeister 2021: 137)

I am proudly ignorant of Saussure (as I've pointed this out several times in this post already), so it should come as no surprise that I protest even against this. What of the cases when we recognize that something is a sign but not its signification? I do not know Chinese but I can very well copy-paste Chinese characters from Wikipedia and use them as my username in an online game, not knowing what they mean. In other words, I may know that something is a sign and stands for something even if I do not know what that something it stands for is. The crucial difference between Peirce and Saussure, for an ignoramus such as myself, consists in the belief that the Saussurean dictum is probably arbitrary cattle-manure and in all likelihood Peirce had already thought of it and has coined a specific term, which maybe twenty or thirty persons currently living may fully understand.

Thus, when Jakobson (1981a[1933-1934]: 750) says that in poetry, the sign and object (or more precisely, the signifier and the signified) do not fall together, it is in no way specific to the poetic function. What could be specific to it, however, is the stress placed on this fact - in other words, on the fact that the sign cannot be identical to itself. It is always marked by a gap, a sort of caesura that is the relation between the signifier and the signified. It would indeed be more accurate to say that the poetic function brings this relation itself to the fore, renders the relation between the signifier and the signified sensible. The relation that is supposed to confirm the conformity between the elements forming the sign is put under question and is thus rendered changeable. We could say, then, that the poetic function stresses the mutability of signifier-signified relations. (Puumeister 2021: 137)

This is perhaps the first instance in this paper where I don't fully grasp the meaning. Does the first sentence imply that the signifier and signifier "do not fall together" when the other functions are dominant? If so, then in which ones, and in which way? The only one that I can think of is the emotive, which "tends to produce an impression of certain emotion, whether true or feigned" (Jakobson 1960d: 22), which in my opinion perfectly illustrates the problems brought on by the lack of interpretant and/or object in Saussure's system (for neither exactly equals the "signified"): what does the intonation of an utterance signify? - Here, I realize, is the crux of the difference between Peirce's triadic and Saussure's dyadic systems: an interpretation of an utterance can draw out whatever is there, whereas the "constitutive and arbitrary relation between the signifier [..] and the signified" concerns only what is supposed to be there. [Mis seal on vs Mis seal peaks olema - Peirce'i ja Saussure'i süsteemide erinevus ilmneb siin justkui deskriptiivse ja preskriptiivse lähenemise oma.] It's beginning to make sense why Serge Karcevski's (1941) Saussurean approach to intonation took two decades to come to fruition (and since it's in French I know nothing more about it). That is to say that, in this instance, I don't think that either pair of terms is very well suited: the identification of sign with signifier and object with signified raises the question of incompatibilites between Peirce and Saussure, a lengthy and overly complex song-and-dance routine skirting around anything concrete, in which I cannot participate with any credibility because I simply don't care for Saussure. What I do care for is Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions, and in this instance I don't see how the relation between sign and object could even apply on all the other functions in Jakobson's scheme. Referential? No problem. Emotive? No... Conative? Uh... Metalingual... Actually, maybe... Phatic? Not sure. In short, it's a whole mess when viewed from this specific perspective. This is where the poetic and referential functions may be compared. I think that a lot more leg-work is in order with the referential function to do so competently, but Jakobson's core argument here is easy enough: in the referential function, a sign and object do "fall together", a sign refers to an object; or, a signifier and a signified "fall together", a signifier (*sigh*) signifies a signified. When the poetic function is dominant, on the other hand, a sign doesn't neccessarily refer to its habitual object. Or, the association between the signifier and signifier is "shaken up", as if the completed puzzle is scrambled into pieces... This is of course metaphorical - the point being that in the poetic use of language one can construct utterances that may say anything. In fact I could very take my inspiration from Lotman & Uspenskii (1975) and write a couplet: "The world is matter and the world is a horse // I don't care as long as it doesn't veer off its course", since neither option constricts my imagination. I could very well add a few more couplets how it would actually be amazing if humankind figured out how to make the planet Earth into a steerable spaceship that we could veer off its current course to travel our galaxy or the universe. It doesn't matter because poetry allows for poetic licence - poetic utterances don't have truth-value: viewed as signs, they don't have to correspond to reality. Where things get really interesting from a theoretical standpoint is the "sensible" in this passage. Paraphrasing (in the footnote) the very same passage from Jakobson quoted by Gramigna (2021: 36, infra), this wording sets sensibility (or rather, since it's a process, sensibilization?) in contrast with automatization. I was wondering for a moment there if something could be done with the sensible/intelligible distinction there but I guess not. It is just a bit curious that poetry, the deautomatization of the relation between sign and object, should lead to "awareness of reality", but the point itself is familiar enough from Victor Shklovsky's "Art as Technique".

What does the following statement mean: "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination" (Jakobson 1960: 358)? The axis of combination is related to syntactical structuring, but syntactical structuring does not refer simply to the order of words in a sentence. Rather, we are dealing here with all kinds of elements that are co-present in a text (a poem, more specifically). Typically, the elements belonging to the axis of selection have independent denotations; they can be treated in isolation: a specific word has a specific meaning independent of the context it is used in. But this is not the case for poetry; the elements of a poem cannot be treated separately from each other. (Puumeister 2021: 138)

"Shifters" illustrate the point well - "I" and "you" do have a dictionary meaning but in actual use their meaning shifts around depending upon who is addressing whom. As to "all kinds of elements", most of Jakobson's efforts in poetic analyses are focused on grammatical categories (hence the "grammar of poetry"), i.e. how the smallest elements of language (syllables, suffixes, not to mention all the phonological stuff) modify the whole structure.

The famous statement that "[e]quivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence" (Jakobson 1960: 358) is an expression of a profound formalism. It is not the denotational meanings of words that constitute the sense of a poem; rather, it is the combination of independently non-denotational elements that produce this sense - the meaning of a poem as a whole. This operation of the poetic function explains why poetry is not reducible to ordinary language use; the signs in a poetic statement start to refer to each other and to the relations that they have with each other: "here it is the interpretive relation between linguistic signs which is important" (Waugh 1985: 153). (Puumeister 2021: 138)

There goes my spiel against self-referentiality - right out the window. Yes, indeed, equalized code units implicitly refer to each other. That this form of reference is "implicit" is the best way I can think of to represent the fact that this is not what is usually meant by "reference", that the "object" refered to - the equivalent code unit - remains on the level of syntactic structure (hence the self-referentiality).

We must note that Jakobson does not speak of projecting the elements of the axis of combination to the axis of selection; he speaks of the projection of the axis itself. Poetic meaning is grammatical (combinatorial), and poetry invents its own grammar by constituting grammatical categories (that outside of poetry can be seen as the means by which the proper meaning of denotational elements are brought out) as significational. (Puumeister 2021: 138)

Not so sure about this. "The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination" (Jakobson 1960d: 27). The way I understand it is that the similarities between various speech sounds become the driving force (the constitutive device) of a poetic statement. Take any MF DOOM line, like "Used to rent a van from Peter Pan to red and tan", and you'll find rhymes interspersed throughout (not just ending a line). "Rhyme" doesn't do it justice - the principle of equivalence operates primarily with speech sounds: van, Pan, and tan do indeed rhyme, but rent, Peter, and red are also part of it - they are equalized by the repetition of e. IMO the point of Jakobson's formula is simply this: that the words used in a poetic utterance are motivated by their sounding similar (the principle of equivalence) rather than any other consideration (e.g. their dictionary meanings), and combined in a regular or at least deliberate, measured sequence.

Here we can already see why "[t]he language of poetry strives to reach, as a final limit, the phonetic, or rather - to the extent that such a purpose may be present - the euphonic phrase - in other words, a trans-sense speech" (Jakobson 1997[1919/1921]: 207). That is, at its limit, the poetic language strives to rid itself of other functions altogether, to become not only the dominant but the sole function of a message. It is, of course, only at the price of depriving itself of communicability that it is able to achieve such a goal. But this is why Jakobson stresses the limit-situation of such a language: it is an ideal for poetry to have no connection to communication, to present itself as itself. This ideal legitimizes the concentration of poetics on the "problems of verbal structure" (Jakobson 1960: 350). (Puumeister 2021: 139)

Good catch: Jakobson, Roman 1997[1919/1921]. The newest Russian poetry: V. Xlebnikov. In: My Futurist Years (Jangfeldt, Bengt; Rudy, Stephen, eds.) New York: Marsilio Publishers, 173-208. [ESTER] - The point about the poetic function striving to become not only the determinative but absolutely determining function is a good one, especially the contrast with communicability. I think that a case could be made for all three metafunctions being incommunicative, but once again the metalinguistic function is a stick in the spokes and raises the question if explaining the words and expressions you use is communication. Yes and no, depending upon your definition of communication.

Similar sentiments are present in Viktor Shklovsky's concept of 'estrangement' that focuses primarily on the manner in which the reader perceives [|] the text: "Poetry is a special mode of thinking" (Shklovsky 1991[1917]: 1). Following Shklovsky, we could say that poetry is a mode of thinking that is directed toward the discovery of new relations and elements in the world: "The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By 'estranging' objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and 'laborious'" (Shklovsky 1991[1917]: 6). At the centre of artistic estrangement lies de-automatization: the potentiality to view things in a new light, in a way previously unknown to us - art makes sensible things that were not sensible before. "Art is a means of experiencing the process of creativity" (ibid.). (Puumeister 2021: 143-144)

Indeed, the same shift from the faculty of understanding to the faculty of perception is operative in the poetic function: instead of hearing a word and automatically grasping the meaning of said word, poetry draws our attention to the sound of said words, making them object of perception instead of signs referring to objects.

Bennett, Tyler James 2021. Incompatibility, unlimited semiosis, aesthetic function. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 149-163.

The projection of the principle of equivalence to the axis of combination overlays the predominantly metonymic operations at the level of the syntagm with another signification system characterized by the vertical paradigmatic selection axis according to rules of similarity and metaphor. In poetry, attention is drawn to these spatial relations by means of such devices as rhyme, rhythm, meter, and other secondary modelling systems. (Bennett 2021: 149)

An agreeable use of the concept of "secondary modelling systems".

The poetic function in his communication model designates the ways in which the words used do not correspond to their usual referents, but some other features or words, particularly to new or unexpected ones. (Bennett 2021: 149)

Smoothly bypassing the issue I had with framing the poetic function as self-referentiality: "correspondance" captures the implicit reference well.

Artistic objects are exemplary of the semiotic mechanism of creativity not because they are the only site of semiosis, but because they are those which are designed to induce semiosis in the interpreting subject. Their study can inform the study of semiosis at any level and in any domain. (Bennett 2021: 150)

Touching upon the point of deautomatization/estrangement: instead of the effortless, nearly unconscious processing of the associations between sign and object or signans and signatum, (verbal) art induces a search for associations. The "bridge" between sign and object is demolished so that it becomes necessary to build one oneself. This is the third paper in this volume that quotes or paraphrases that passage on the mobility of concepts from "What Is Poetry?".

Peirce upholds this definition of the sign in a variety of places, such as here: "a sign is not a sign unless it translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed" (CP 5.594) and here: "There is no exception, therefore, to the law that every thought-sign is translated or interpreted in a subsequent one, unless it be that all thought comes to an abrupt and final death" (CP 5.284). The key term here is unlimited semiosis, popularized by Umberto Eco to describe Peirce's idea of sign translation. (Bennett 2021: 151)

This is what I quibbled over somewhere above (cf. Gramigna 2021: 43), my point being that Peirce had "thought-signs" in mind, not verbal signs.

Short's argument hinges primarily on one manuscript, on the basis of which he establishes a hard break in Peirce with the early 'thought-sign' [|] doctrine and with unlimited semiosis. The change of Peirce's doctrine, decidedly away from mentalism and towards something closer to realism, is not in dispute. What is in dispute is Short's claim that the changes presented in the late manuscript call for the repudiation of unlimited semiosis; i.e., one can accept nearly everything Short says about Peirce's mature theory, and still accept unlimited semiosis. (Bennett 2021: 154-155)

I've heard something about this from the author many years ago but my modest knowledge of Peirceanism is not sufficient to grasp the details fully.

Without a doubt, Peirce is deeply interested in extension, concrete reference, and empirical reality, and to read Peirce with a special interest in indeterminacy and unlimited semiosis is to read Peirce against the grain. If Eco were not so clear, that this is just what he is doing, when he calls himself 'Peircest' rather than 'Peircean' (Eco 1976: 1458), this reading could be seen as opportunistic, however it is the opposite which is the case. (Bennett 2021: 157)

Makes me wonder if my own thinking is "Jakobsonian" or "Jakobsonistic".

Nöth notes the importance of the correction as it is described by Short: "With this shift from a semantic to a truly pragmatic theory of meaning, Peirce succeeds, [|] as Short put it, to 'break out of the hermeneutic circle of words interpreting words and thoughts interpreting thoughts'" (2007: 59) (Nöth 2016: 60). (Bennett 2021: 157-158)

The kind of loopy thinking I've been thrown into at least once even in this post with the sensible and the intelligible - making the sensible intelligible and the intelligible sensible, etc.

The ultimate interpretant and terminus of the chain of semiosis, which Short describes as the very condition of meaning, can be compared with the situation Jakobson referred to, where the relation between concept and sign becomes automatized and the connection to reality dies out. In a seeming reversal of Peirce's original position, Short holds that Peirce sides with the positivists on the topic of what is meaning. Rather than meaning being that plural potential space in which new translations are always happening (as Jakobson, Lotman, and evidently Nöth would have it), by Short's reading of Peirce the meaning resides at the other end of the spectrum, with concrete, predictable interpretants. Short's argument is that, for the mature Peirce, only the situation where translation ceases, only where no more interpretation is necessary and conduct can go forward in an automated cycle, only here is meaning. This implies, again in apparent agreement with the logical positivists, that ambiguous constructions in language (such as metaphor) have no proper meaning because their interpretation cannot be automatized. Or at least this is the conclusion Short tries to squeeze out of a few late comments by Peirce. (Bennett 2021: 158)

Open or closed. Constructing a perfectly logical and self-sufficient system or developing a plurality of systems as-if organically. Reminds me of a startling instance when I read a short philosophy paper by some British (I guess?) psychologist and he said something to the effect that the end-goal of consciousness is the lack of consciousness, that the true end of thinking towards which we should strive is becoming so automatic that there is nothing left to think about. For me this was a startling position, as if advocating for humans to become machines.

Using the theories of Jakobson and Lotman it has been shown that the creative or aesthetic moment of semiosis features the intersection of at least two incompatible codes, which can be described in terms of the interaction of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes, and discrete and continuously coded chain structures. The uncanny experience of aesthetic meaning, the paradox of that sublimity, this unreality is for Jakobson and Lotman demonstrably the register of contact with the real world. (Bennett 2021: 159)

I.e. at the moment of semantic explosion it is as if a small rupture is created in the fabric of the semiosphere, a window into the thing-in-itself. There's an obvious parallel with psychedelic experiences, but the theory, beginning with Shlovsky's "Art as Technique" at the very least, stipulates that the magic is always there, just unnoticed because we are creatures of habits who tend to forget what we're doing while we're doing it. The less obvious parallel I've been considering lately is UFO experience: an enormous craft silently hovers over Phoenix, ten thousand people see it, their minds are blown - we are not alone in the universe and there they are, looking down on us from a safe distance as we do on safari tours - and then the government shoots up flairs in a similar formation so that they can say that that's what people saw, and that is that, life goes on as if nothing happened. A common theme in sighting reports appears to be that the experience is simultaneously unforgettable and inconsequential. It is as if we are constantly surrounded by uncanny phenomena to which we pay no attention because our habits make them seem mundane. The psychedelic trope of looking at your own hands and being amazed at the wonders that they are comes to mind. I believe we are able to freak ourselves out by looking at anything long and/or closely enough.

The prerequisite for this mobility of concepts in the presence of at least two incompatible codes; whether they be Jakobson's intersection of the axes of selection and combination of Lotman's incompatible chain structures. Further, the best reason to pursue the synthesis of Peirce with structural semiology is their incompatibility. Absent this cognitive dissonance, there is no creativity. (Bennett 2021: 162)

Very well put. Reminds me of the saying that only the most difficult things are actually worth doing.

Sütiste, Elin 2021. The functional roots of Jakobson's plural concept of translation. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 164-185.

It would be difficult to imagine 20th-century humanities without Roman Jakobson who has become a textbook figure in several fields, including linguistics, semiotics, and translation studies. (Sütiste 2021: 164)

Good phrase. Him being a textbook figure also has its downsides, though. An EBSCO discovery search yields thousands of papers that mention him, yet only a small fraction of them actually add something valuable or interesting, most just reiterate his scheme. And when you search for books instead of papers you get, with very few uninteresting exceptions, only SAGE Encyclopaedias of this and that. In other words, there is so much noise to sift through that finding true gems is seriously hampered.

One of the areas that acknowledges Jakobson as an influential conceptualizer of the central object studied is translation research. At the same time, the discussion of Jakobson's ideas with regard to translation has often remained limited to the most conspicuous pronouncements in just a handful of his writings. For instance, in linguistics, semiotics and translation studies academic reference works the reception of Jakobson's conceptualization of translation has revolved mostly around his distinction between three kinds of translation and his views on language use, especially language use with the predominant poetic function, with more than two-thirds of Jakobson's entire reception in encyclopedias of linguistics, semiotics, and translation studies being based on the significance attributed to Jakobson's two articles out of his legacy of close to 700 works (Sütiste 2008: 300, 308). (Sütiste 2021: 164)

"Linguistics and Poetics" (1960d) and "On Linguistic Aspects of Translation" (1959e). It is also curious that they were published so closely. It is as if Jakobson had a brief flash, a momentary opening for his ideas to enter the mainstream.

Itamar Even-Zohar has adjusted Jakobson's communication scheme for the description of literary polysystems (Even-Zohar 1990: 31ff.). (Sütiste 2021: 164)

Definitely something I should take a look at: Even-Zohar, Itamar 1997[1990]. Polysystem studies. Poetics Today 11(1). [Online]

A semiotic understanding of language, that is, a view that emphasizes language as a complex system composed of signs, had attracted Jakobson's attention already since his formative years, especially since acquaintance with Ferdinand de Saussure's ideas and works around 1920, but got special impetus in his mature years during his life in the United States when he became familiar with the works of Charles S. Peirce. [...] According to Waugh and Monville-Burston (2002: viii), Jakobson first heard of F. de Saussure's ideas through Sergej Karcevskij in 1917 and read his Cours de linguistique générale in the early 1920s. (Sütiste 2021: 165)

More detail on this issue (previously addressed twice above).

Central to Jakobson's understanding of sign is his emphasis on meaning, and translation, for Jakobson, is very directly related to the meaning of signs: in fact, a sign's meaning (signatum) manifests as that sign's translation into some other sign (e.g. Jakobson 1971g[1959]: 267). In this line of thinking, Jakobson is expressly following Charles S. Peirce who has argued that "meaning, [...] is, in its primary acceptation, the translation of a sign into another system of signs" (CP 4.127). (Sütiste 2021: 166)

Finally! I have previously expressed my doubts on this point, foremost because it seems odd that Peirce would talk of sign systems ("systems of signs", on thand, yes). More context: "People who talk in this way do not see that what they say is a justification of the idea of a part such as the whole contains an innumerable multitude of. [...] These people do not seem to have analyzed the conception of a "meaning," which is, in its primary acceptation, the translation of a sign into another system of signs, and which, in the acceptation here applicable, is a second assertion from which all that follows from the first assertion equally follows, and vice versa. [...] This is as much as to say that one assertion "means" the other." (CP 4.127) - So, indeed, Peirce did have verbal signs (assertions) in mind. Good, from now on I don't have to worry my little head with the possibility that Jakobson might have misread or taken too many liberties when attributing Peirce as the source of his translationism. All is well.

Elsewhere, Peirce has also emphasized that "a sign is not a sign unless it translates itself into another sign in which it is more fully developed" (CP 5.594). According to Jakobson, "the cardinal property of language [...] [is] the translatability of any verbal sign into another, more explicit one" (Jakobson 1985c[1972]: 87). Thus, Jakobson's dual view of sign is reconciled with Peircean tripartite concept of sign through Peirce's notion of interpretant, which is the translation of the sign into a new sign (cf. Andrews 1990). (Sütiste 2021: 166)

This part of his translationism I enjoy perhaps the most: there is a clear equivalence between a "more fully developed" and a "more explicit" sign. In CP 4.127, of course, this does not show: it is sufficient that the target assertion is equal to the source assertion, that what logically "follows" from them, i.e. what they mean, is the same. That is, the brief note about meaning in 4.127 does not require that the translation be more fully developed - I should look into what follows from this aspect of development. In Jakobson's version, the "more explicit" is intuitively understandable: the first assertion and the second assertion say the same but in a longer form, with ellipses "filled in". It is as if Peirce's "more developed" concerns the signatum and Jakobson's "more explicit" the signans.

Meaning for Jakobson is foremost a matter of the cognitive, referential level of language; this corresponds to the "context" in Jakobson's scheme of communication. While of course expressed with the specific grammatical, prosodic, lexical etc. means of a particular language, in everyday usage of language, grammar and prosody are usually "transparent", having no direct bearing on the cognitive level of language. Thus the cognitive level of language is always transmissible: "All cognitive experience and its classification is conveyable in any existing language" (Jakobson 1971h[1959]: 263). Jakobson regards the fundamental feature of translatability in language as an expression of metalingual function, e.g.: [|]
In its cognitive function, language is minimally dependent on the grammatical pattern, because the definition of our experience stands in complementary relation to metalinguistic operations - the cognitive level of language not only admits but directly requires recoding interpretation, i.e., translation. Any assumption of ineffable or untranslatable cognitive data would be a contradiction in terms. (Jakobson 1971h[1959]: 265)
(Sütiste 2021: 166-167)

I'm not absolutely certain in the first statement. But then again I am unable to easily point to "meaning" in Jakobson's oeuvre. I would have thought that all six functions are involved with meaning. The referential function definitely requires more careful study: as Gvoždiak (2021: 66; infra) pointed out, it is remarkably blurry. In the quote given here I particularly like the expression "recoding interpretation", perhaps equaling "elucidating interpretation" (cf. notes above). Adding both "cognitive" and "interpretation" to the list of terms to check up in SW.

We see, then, that Jakobson's notion of metalanguage is in fact rooted in intralingual translation:
On these two different levels of language the same verbal stock may be used; thus we may speak in English (as metalanguage) about English (as object language) and interpret English words and sentences by means of English synonyms and circumlocutions. Jeremy Bentham respectively delineates "expositions by translation and by paraphrasis". (Jakobson 1985g[1976]: 117)
Among other writings, a set of papers that also shed light on the issue of translation and its relation to metalingual operations, concerns aphasia (e.g. Jakobson 1971g[1955], 1971e[1956], 1971k[1963], but also 1985g[1976]). (Sütiste 2021: 167)

The citation to Bentham is missing. I found the passage in Ogden's Bentham's Theory of Fictions (1932). Both "translation" and "paraphrasis" appear 23 times within it, but not together like Jakobson gives it. The book itself looks exceedingly interesting. The sequence of citations according to the bibliography linked in the beginning of the post: 1955a, 1956a, 1964b, and 1976e.

Equivalence is conceived of as being relative and "floating", as in substitution sets where "signs are linked by various degrees of similarity which fluctuate between the equivalence of synonyms and the common core of antonyms" (Jakobson 1971e[1956]: 244). Jakobson refers to translation and related phenomena - transformation, transference and transposition - as all being manifestations of equivalence relation (1985c[1972]: 91). (Sütiste 2021: 168)

The "axis of selection" is more like a semantic cloud.

Jakobson stresses that "Any part of linguistics is preoccupied by a search for invariants in their relation to variations", adding that "All the applications of this principle deal primarily with the semantic value of verbal signs" (Jakobson 1985d[1974]: 99). The same principle is applicable also in case of translation: since translation is essentially reiteration of the meaning of a previous utterance using different signs, it has an invariant aspects (i.e., the common core of source and target utterances) as well as a variable aspect (that which is different in the source and target utterances). (Sütiste 2021: 168)

Not nearly as striking as viewing intelligble side of the sign (thesignatum) as the "translatable aspect" (above). That the variant/invariant distinction deals primarily with semantic value, on the other hand, is news to me. I have the impression that it is primarily phonological, e.g. "the upward shift of pitch remains an unaltered invariant mark of the Russian consonantal opposition sharp ~ plain" (Jakobson 1966a: 248). It can probably be applied on anything one wish, as is illustrated here - the similarities between target and source languages as the invariant, and differences between the as variant.

Compared to artificial languages, the human language's vagueness and abundance of possibilities for paraphrase make it at first sight "uneconomical" yet prove to be one of its major strengths: "The variability of meanings, their manifold and far-reaching figurative shifts, and an incalculable aptitude for multiple paraphrases are just those properties of natural language which induce its creativity and endow not only poetic but even scientific activities with a continuously inventive sweep" (Jakobson 1971r[1967]: 659). (Sütiste 2021: 170)

Inspiring stuff. Any assertion in natural language can be paraphrased endlessly, expanded and constricted, etc. My own dabbling with the text of Malinowski's phatic communion is a case in point: in one lengthy expression, my own translation and the official translation didn't overlap at all:

  • "under some restraint and with slightly veiled impatience"
  • "üksjagu kammitsetult ja veidi varjatud kärsitusega"
  • "mõningase vaoshoituse ja kergelt peidetud kannatamatusega"

I have two plans for that text. 1) An intralinguistic translation (paraphrase) into modern English, employing current scientific terminology, which might make its more difficult vicissitudes more easily understandable for the modern reader who can't hack through expressions like "avowedly spurious"; and 2) an interlingual translation (but also a paraphrase) into older Estonian, employing out-of-date verbiage and dead-on-arrival neologisms from a century ago, which would be an aesthetic affair - an experiment in what the text might have looked and sounded like if it were translated into Estonian immediately after publication in 1923. I think that might be called an artistic translation ("kunstitõlge").

One of the examples that show the potentiality and possibility of play in and with language comes from Jakobson's observations how children approach language: "Children's freedom to diversify the context of one and the same word creates a difference between the proper, nuclear meaning of this word and its marginal, figurative (metaphoric or metonymic) meanings; two interlinked properties of human language, its context sensitivity and its creativeness, become apparent." (Jakobson 1985a[1969]: 95; for a description of this practice see also 1971j[1962]). (Sütiste 2021: 170)

That is a baffling use of the word "context". I think I should revisit his referential function in painstaking detail because the factor of "context" is indeed ambiguous. Here it comes across as the semantic space of a given word. Yet, on the very next page in the same paper he uses it in a commonsensical manner I have referred to several times already in this post: "The act of pointing at the given non-verbalized situation is complemented or replaced by pointing at the verbal context of one's own or interlocutor's message" (Jakobson 1975: 96). After so many years of reading him, I'm still in the dark about what some of his key terms exactly mean.

Creativity is further enhanced in poetic function: "the core of this [= poetic] function is to push transformations into the foreground. It is the purposeful poetic use of lexical and grammatical tropes and figures that brings the creative power of language to its summit" (Jakobson 1985c[1972]: 92.) Jakobson has on several occasions discussed instances of conflict between the "normal", general meaning of grammatical categories and the meaning they acquire in particular poetic texts (e.g. Jakobson 1985b[1972]: [|] 109, 1971h[1959]: 265-266). (Sütiste 2021: 170)

Huh. Above, when I read that "poetry invents its own grammar" (Puumeister 2021: 138) I was very close to commenting that I don't think it does. Glad I kept my mouth shut.

Jakobson has stated that in case of artistic translation, it makes more sense to talk about creative transposition (Jakobson 1971h[1959]: 266). From how Jakobson characterizes the features of translation and the nature of artistic text, it appears that creative transposition takes into account a text's cognitive, semantic meaning as well as the grammatical form plus their interplay. (Sütiste 2021: 171)

Above, when I italicized "artistic translation", I thought it an odd term. Good to know that I didn't hallucinate the existence of this term. The way I see it, it would still be translation in the sense that the result would still say approximately the same as the original, but with extra flourish and liberal additions, making it more explicit where it feels necessary.

Zuzana Jettmarová has pointed out that one of the founders of the Prague Linguistic Circle Vilém Mathesius proposed, already in 1913,
a functionalist theory of verse translation - the substitution theory - based on functional substitution of style, that is to say on the principle of function-for-function on the level of the whole (i.e. the sign as a work of art), in place of the traditional word-for-word or meaning-for-meaning dichotomy; he called the functionalist method of poem-for-poem translation přebásnění (rendered as transversification [in the translation of J. Lévy's book Art of Translation]). (Jettmarová 2011: xx)
Jettmarová explains that what Jakobson (1971h[1959]) meant by creative transposition probably stands for this Czech concept. That for Jakobson, artistic translation would involve, most importantly, transfer, or rather - re-creation - of the relations (interplay) between the expression plane and the content plane, would also be supported by his view of poetry: [...] (Sütiste 2021: 171)

Makes a lot of sense, even for prose. Instead of translating words and meaning you'll translate what specific parts do, what they are supposed to accomplish. It would effectively be the translation of the "General intention of the text", as Lotman et al. called it.

Osimo, Bruno 2021. Translation from rags to riches in Jakobson. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 186-202.

Jakobson's contribution to the science of translation is invaluable - and undervalued: citations from Jakobson tend to be drawn from the best-known article, while the rest of his work is mostly ignored. Just think that, while "On linguistic aspects of translation" (Jakobson 1971c[1959]) was cited 5882 times, other seminal papers on which, for example, this paper is based were cited, on average, from 20 to 100 times less (Google Scholar 2020). (Osimo 2021: 186)

More data on the simultaneously immense and meager reception of Jakobson.

In this context, some of Jakobson's most famous quotations on translation - like the often misquoted three types of translation - sound rather dumb, like a cry in the desert, and their presence in many articles is a red cherry on top of a white cake: everyone looks at it, but nobody tastes it. (Osimo 2021: 186)

I'm happily ignorant as to how they even can be misquoted. That "everyone looks at it, but nobody tastes it" is very well put. The only thing sadder than that is when no-one even looks at it, in which case it may never be tasted.

In modern science, when a researcher says something that is a conscious or nonconscious reference to someone else without explicating that it is a reference, the result is usually not very good: he is considered a plagiarist. However, in Saussure's case, his words were mythologized, and nobody before Jakobson took the pain of checking Saussure's sources, neither his students, who wrote down his thoughts and published them under his name, nor the Western European researchers, who for nearly a century have been absorbing his thought with much interest. (Osimo 2021: 189)

Jakobson is not in the clear in this. My own paper in this volume is an attempt to trace his sources on one very narrow question where it is possible. How many misattributions an unattributed material there may be in the whole of Selected Writings is anyone's guess, and could take several decades to track down.

With this series of examples, we see an attempt to extend the notion of "translation", starting, however, from Peirce's attempt to enlarge the notion of "sign" using the very notion of "translation". "Translation" seems no longer to be a peripheral notion, since it is used to define signification, semiosis. (Osimo 2021: 190)

Hence why it seems permissible to call this aspect of Jakobson's oeuvre "translationism".

This article aims at repositioning translation among other disciplines, giving it its rightful place as the centre of semiotics ("the meaning of a sign is the sign it has to be translated into"; Peirce 4: 132) and a discipline of all signs, within which linguistics plays an important but not exclusive role. (Osimo 2021: 195)

The first time I've ever seen someone get a reference to Peirce wrong. In the bibliography it's still "CP = Peirce, [...]".

Viewing meanings as a translation process, we can use Popovič's terminology and call "prototext" the sign and "metatext" the object(s). This is the view from the translator's point of view. From the critic's point of view, the prototext would be the object and the metatext the sign. (Osimo 2021: 196)

Eh... Neither has been defined within this paper.

Another metalinguistic misunderstanding derives from the notion of "context", restricted to outer ('objective') context, while inner ('subjective') context is equally fundamental for the (mis-) understanding of signs, for their translation (i.e. meaning attribution, both explicit and implicit: [...] (Osimo 2021: 197)

I don't yet know what Jakobson's context exactly is, so I wouldn't know how to divide it. Is the outer context his "non-verbalized" context? Is the inner context that semantic space I pointed out above? Dividing an ambiguous concept amounts to dividing by zero. (P.S. the parentheses were left wide open.)

But as much as temperature, pressure, gravity etc. are indices for a physicist, the various symbols used by people, verbal and non-verbal, even if they are symbols, are indices through which the semiotician can reconstruct by way of conjectures their causes and motivations. Therefore, even if teh environmental indices of a semiotician are more often symbols, their relationship to their environment is, similarly to Jakobson's physicist example, that of an index. (Osimo 2021: 198)

What the hell am I reading?

We can finally reread the most famous Jakobson quotation in this new light. When he speaks about "intersemiotic translation", saying that "intersemiotic translation or transmutation is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems" (Jakobson 1971c[1959]: 261), he doesn't refer only to all kinds of transfer from verbal to nonverbal codes as usually understood. He also refers to every single act of understanding (decoding) or writing/speaking (coding) because any act of coding/decoding necessitates the translation from/into a mental inner speech that serves as a metalanguage for each individual to think and say. (Osimo 2021: 200)

The logical conclusion of translationism: every mental act is actually a process of translation. I'm perceiving the world? No! I am engaged in a process of intersemiotic translation from the source protolanguage of outer context into the target metalanguage of mental imagery, good sir!

Kroó, Katalin 2021. The syntagmatic and paradigmatic sign development through Jakobson's concepts (aspects of semantic and semiotic dynamics). In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 203-226.

Taking direction from Roman Jakobson's theoretical legacy, this paper will examine some essential features of the scholar's famous definition for the paradigmatic and syntagmatic aspects of "verbal behaviour". The definition is not only well-known but has been extensively explored in various critical studies. Our approach sets as its aim to grasp and clarify in a new way the theoretical and methodological relevance to literary semiotics of the definition of the poetic function given by Jakobson through the concepts of the paradigmatic and syntagmatic linguistic operations. (Kroó 2021: 203)

Sounds promising. Those critical studies:

  • Culler, Jonathan 1975. Jakobson's poetic analyses. In: Structural Poetics. Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London, Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 55-74.
  • Nesselroth, Peter W. 2014. Reopening the "Closing statement": Jakobson's factors and functions in our Google Galaxy. In: Roman O. Jakobson: A Work in Progress. (Kubíček, Tomáš; Lass, Andrews, eds.) Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 25-36.
  • Kraus, Jiří 2014. Roman Jakobson's work on poetic language from the point of view of the revival of rhetoric in the 20th century. In: Roman O. Jakobson: A Work in Progress. (Kubíček, Tomáš; Lass, Andrews, eds.) Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 65-76.
  • Schmid, Wolf 2014. Parallelism in prose. In: Roman O. Jakobson: A Work in Progress. (Kubíček, Tomáš; Lass, Andrews, eds.) Olomouc: Univerzita Palackého v Olomouci, 11-24.
By now, Jakobson's explanation of the poetic function, that the "poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination" (Jakobson 1987c[1960]: 71), is a frequently cited axiom in literary studies (see, for example, Smirnov 1985; Faryno 1989). (Kroó 2021: 203)

This paper's bibliography is a treasure trove: Farno, Jerzy 1989. The position of text in the structure of the literary work. In: Issues in Slavic Literary and Cultural Theory. (Eichenmacher, Karl; Grzybek, Peter; Witte, Georg, eds.; Bochum Publications in Evolutionary Cultural Semiotics.) Bochum: Universitätsverlag Dr. Norbert Brockmeyer, 291-319. [ESTER]

What is set as the criterion here is "a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sequence" (Jakobson 1987c[1960]: 71) in the most varied structural series (Lotman would say, and he does say: in various "contextual structures" [Lotman 1977: 59] - "контекстные структуры" [Lotman 1970: 79] / "constructional contexts" [Lotman 1977: 77] - "конструктивные контексты" [Lotman 1970: 101]). All this is about forms of repetition, which develop equivalences in time, realised semantically in processes evolving in the succession of repeated elements. In the definition of the poetic function, the interpretation of the equivalence pertaining already to the sequence, i.e. to the syntagmatic axis, brings to the fore semantics evolving in the temporal continuum, i.e. underlines dynamic semantics. This, however is defined not as a neutral fact or natural textual state of affairs from the start, but as a kind of transformation in the sense of a projection operation, the transposition of equivalence from the axis of selection onto the axis of combination/sequence, i.e. syntagmatics. (Kroó 2021: 204)

"Thus the accidental, individual, concrete facts of life do not for me enter into any system; abstract, logical facts all belong to one system; and the secondary, concrete facts found in art belong to at least two systems. The capacity of a textual element to enter into several contextual structures [|] and to take on different meaning in each context is one of the most profound properties of the artistic text" (Lotman 1977: 59-60); "So we are obliged to conclude that a relational structure is not a sum of material details, but a set of relations which is primary in a work of art and constitutes its base, its reality. But this set is constructed not like a multi-storied hierarchy without internal intersections, but like a complex structure of mutually intersecting substructures with the same element [|] frequently entering into various constructional contexts. It is these intersections which constitute the "thingness" of an artistic text, its material diversity, which reflects the fantastical non-systemic order of the surrounding world with such verisimilitude that the the unattentive reader begins to believe that this randomness, the uniue individuality of an artistic text, and the properties of reality it reflects, are all identical" (Lotman 1977: 76-77). Wow. It'll take a long while yet before I've got Jakobson pinned down securely enough to start tying Lotman (if even only his early writings) down next to him.

Here we should remember the difference to which Waugh calls our attention in the context of the Jakobsonian interpretation of the part-whole relation, speaking of 1) "prefabricated wholes" (e.g. the word), 2) signs being "codified only as a general matrix or pattern of combination" (e.g. the phrase) and 3) "generalized and optional patterns of combination" (utterances, discourses) (Waugh 1985: 146-147). Cf. Jakobson 1971e[1963]. (Kroó 2021: 204)

It's that hierarchy of units visualised in the Theses... (cf.Lotman et al. 2013[1973]: 67): "The fact that all of these entities, from the discourse to its ultimate components (distinctive features), have quite different statuses in respect to the verbal code and present diverse degrees of relative dependence does not justify the attempts to exclude some of these units from the realistic and comprehensive portrayal of language as it actually is - a multistoried hierarchy of wholes and parts" (Jakobson 1963e: 281). It looks like one of Waugh's own favourite topics. Waugh, Linda R. 1985. The poetic function and the nature of language. In: Jakobson, Roman. Verbal Art, Verbal Sign, Verbal Time. (Pomorska, Krystyna; Rudy, Stephen, eds.; with the assistance of Brent Vine.) Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 143-168. [ESTER]

This principle is in accordance with Jakobson's other definition of the poetic function of language, according to which its main characteristic feature lies in its "set (Einstellung) toward the message, as such, focus on the message for its own sake" (Jakobson 1987c[1960]: 69). If we read together the two characterisations of poetic language, this "set" toward the message, i.e. the strongest orientation to it, may be interpreted as a concentration on the process of the dynamic generation of the poetic message. (Kroó 2021: 205)

Thus, if projecting the principle of equivalence from, let's say, code to message amounts to a "transformation in the direction of semantic dynamics" (ibid., 205), then the poetic function also draws the reader's attention to this fact. That is, the poetic function operates both on the sender and receiver: the sender uses equivalence as a "constitutive device" of the message, and by doing so draws the receiver's attention to the fact that a constitutive device has been used (to the fact that the message is poetic). This "semantic dynamics" amounts to what I usually describe vulgarly as shaking the habitual semantic relations between sign and object loose: words no-longer mean what they do in the dictionary, instead, their meaning has to be found in the immediate context, in the metaphors and other literary devices used within the text (or, in case of poetic reference, in the literary works the poem is influeced by). On the validity of Jakobson's poetic function on prose, the author recommends, among others already noted, Kraxenberger, Maria 2014. Jakobson revisited: Poetic distinctiveness, modes of operation, and perception. RIFL 8(1): 10-21. [Open Access]

Let us recall here Lotman's reminder of Tynjanov's concept of the "compactness of the verbal series in a line" ("теснота стихового ряда"):
Thus any meaningful segment of an artistic text can be interpreted both as a phrase and as a sequence of phrases. Morover, as a result of what Jurij Tynjanov calls the "compactness" of the verbal series in a line, and Roman Jakobson - the projection of the axis of selection onto the axis of combination - the words set together in an artistic text form a semantically indissoluble whole, a "phraseologism", within a given segment. In this sense any meaningful segment (including the universal segment - the entire text of a work) is correlated not only with a chain of meanings, but also with one indivisible meaning. In other words, any meaningful segment is a word. (Lotman 1977: 86-87)
In this spirit, Lotman speaks about the text and any of its meaningful units in the sense of a "particular, occasional word". (Kroó 2021: 207)

Good catch. This passage makes it more apparent why Jakobson, at least, and possibly through him Lotman, too, is so compatible with Peirce. Recall the latter's dictum to the effect that a book, too, is a symbol. Here, a "universal segment". Metaphorically, any given literary work (entire text) may be, in a sense, merely a small part, a word in the whole sentence (e.g. book series) in the whole discourse of an author's total output. From what I recall from my brief acquaintance with Tynjanov, his method of distinguishing broadly two types of systems (auto- and syn-) is ideally suited for this kind of theorizing.

Lotman's cited work from 1970 approaches this from many points of view. He identifies linguistic (language) and structural systems and the correlations between constructional contexts or structural levels, which in their essence correspond to Jakobson's concept of "sequence" in the sense of Tynjanov's "series" ("ряд") in his article "On literary evolution" (Tynjanov 1971[1927]). Both Jakobson and Tynjanov identify terminologically cultural series in their joint manifesto "Problems in the Study of Language and Literature" (Jakobson; Tynjanov 1987[1928]), testifying to a marked turning point in science history, labelled the "semiotic turn". (Kroó 2021: 208)

This might be the text I've perused without the notes reaching this blog: Tynjanov, Jurij 1971[1927]. On literary evolution. In: Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views. (Matejka, Ladislav; Pomorska, Krystyna, eds.) Cambridge: MIT Press, 66-78. [ESTER]

Nevertheless, if we take some steps backwards in time, selection (in fact the paradigmatic differentiation within language taken as a whole, on the basis of words with similar and opposing meanings) and combination (in its essence the discursive use as syntagmatic verbal formation) will [|] remind us of the tenet in Saussure's linguistics, on which Jakobson unambiguously relies:
In discours, on the one hand, words acquire relations based on the linear nature of language because they are chained together. This rules out the possibility of pronouncing two elements simultaneously (see p. 70). The elements are arranged in sequence on the chain of speaking. Combinations supported by linearity are syntagms. The syntagm is always composed of two or more consecutive units [...]. In the syntagm a term acquires its value only because it stands in opposition to everything that precedes or follows it, or to both. Outside discourse, on the other hand, words acquire relations of a different kind. Those that have something in common are associated in the memory, resulting in groups marked by diverse relations. (Saussure 1959: 123)
(Kroó 2021: 211-212)

Another good catch. The sentence I've emphasized reminds me of "the verbal context of one's own or interlocutor's message" (Jakobson 1975: 96; quoted above). The point being that (syntagmatic and/or communicative) context may determine the meaning of a term or substitute it for another word or expression, even with proper names, as when you agree to call metalinguistics "Ivan Ivanovich" instead (Jakobson 1953d: 557), or when you call the flow of time "Jeremy Bearimy" (in the TV show The Good Place).

About the two cardinal aspects of verbal behaviour, Jakobson states that "[e]ncoding starts with the selection [|] of constituents which are to be combined and integrated into a context" (Jakobson 1971g[1963]: 296). With this he unambiguously asserts that selection functions as the beginning of the encoding process, being one of its two integral phases. Further, he emphasises that "[s]electio nis the antecedent, whereas building up the context is the consequence or the aim of the encoder" (Jakobson 1971g[1963]: 296). With this he permits that selection in fact precedes the encoding process. (Kroó 2021: 212-213)

Reinforcement to the notion that "context" is in some measure synonymous with the message itself (specifically the syntagm of the message). The whole page referred to (Jakobson 1964b: 296) is exceedingly interesting: instead of selection and combination he talks about (autonomous) constituents and context. For my purposes this is a particularly important point because I now realize that this is where I might have picked up the notion that the cryptanalytic model might be fundamental to the scheme of linguistic functions: the sender encodes, creating a context (message) out of autonomous constituents (code); whereas the receiver decodes, identifying the autonomous constituents (code) within the context (message). This is one of those instances (which in my opinion are not infrequent) in Jakobson's oeuvre where one has to apply some terminological substitutions to make sense of what's actually going on. That is to say, fully understanding some finer points in Jakobson's works requires constant and considerable intralingual translation (or exposition by paraphrasis).

The other difference manifests itself in the infinite nature in number and the lack of the definition of the associative relations as compared to the syntagmatic, since any number of associative groups can be taken into consideration. The choice depends on that in which directions and on what lexical or grammatical basis a concrete language unit can be regarded as the centre of an associative constellation in which the units offered for selection may converge: "A particular word is like the centre of a constellation; it is the point of convergence of an indefinite number of co-ordinated terms" (Saussure 1959: 126). (Kroó 2021: 213)

That is, "Equivalence is conceived as being relative and "floating"" (Sütiste 2021: 168, infra). The lengthy quotes from Saussure in the footnotes are valuable, but it's not necessary to echo them here - I'll have to return to them when necessary. In any case, one of the Saussurean expressions that I've picked up from secondary literature and like quite much - "vague uncharted nebulae" - makes a bit more sense now. It should also be noted that there are "diverse relations" (Saussure 1959: 125), implying that similarity is not the only type of association - dissimilarity and/or contrast are also important. In all likelihood all three of Hume's laws of association could be operative.

The definition ["in poetry similarity is superimposed on contiguity"] states unequivocally a "superimposition" implying a definitive hierarchy with the condition that its syntagmatic logic is kept alive. To this crucial point Lotman links his treatment of the problem, making a statement on the opposition of the syntagmatic (called by him "metaphoric" - in the sense of combinatory coordination) and the paradigmatic (called by him "rhythm" - in the sense of the reiteration of equivalences) axes in the literary text: [...] (Kroó 2021: 214)

I took note of this "superimposition" above, but didn't do much with it, just flailed around with duplex structures. I'm not better off now, but the discussion of semiotic vs semantic structures and systems in this paper has definitely been suggestive - first and foremost, that The Structure of the Artistic Text should gain some priority in my reading list. Superficially, it is becoming more and more clear that the axis of selection (i.e. code) can be understood as natural language, i.e. primary modelling system, and when code units are combined with the principle of equivalence in mind (e.g. when the poetic function is dominant), the result is not merely a message but doubly coded message, "rhyme, rhythm, meter," etc. acting as secondary modelling systems (cf. Bennett 2021: 149, infra).

The phenomenon of interiorisation is approached by Lotman through the evaluation of the relations emerging between artistic language (the meaning of signs) and the meanings conveyed by the signs and messages of general everyday language, when he examines from various angles the [|] surplus meanings offered in the literary text and their poetic modes of structuring (in his work under scrutiny for expressions and keywords reflecting this methodology, see, e.g., "additional secondary structure/structural bonds/ordering", Lotman 1977: 35, 53, 81; "second system", Lotman 1977: 73; "a semantic load complementary to that of ordinary speech", Lotman 1977: 184). How the additional/complementary/second(ary) structures are able to endow signs richly with meanings deviating from extratextual semantics depends on the paradigmatic and syntagmatic developmental logic. (Kroó 2021: 215-216)

Very good. I'll have to pay special attention to these instances in The Structure of the Artistic Text. The connections between Jakobson and Lotman fall smack-dab in the center of what I should be focused on, and this paper has definitely presented some valuable clues.

Since the projection of structural contexts/levels/series/(sub)systems onto one another, their mutual recoding by means of semantic features of the other series as the manifestation of their intersemiotic dynamics, corresponds to the game-construction based on the principle of preservation and maintenance in semantic parallelism of simultaneous levels (without their mutual extinction, on the contrary, by serving as "backdrops" for each other, i.e. the basis for relational-comparative semantics), the recoding processes, entailing the reinforcement of parallelisms, resulting in paradigmatic patterns. (Kroó 2021: 216)

Recall one of Lotman's more intuitive illustrations: how the rattle of the train carriage organizes one's linguistic activities (unable to find the exact passage, I've mostly read Lotman in unpublished Estonian translations almost a decade ago - a situation that desperately calls for rectification).

The mode of creation of these paradigms unequivocally takes place within a temporal framework, so it is motivated sequentially; consequently, it is important to stress again that in the artistic text all of the paradigmatic semantic patterns mut be considered as dynamic constructions. The recipient also experiences this, [|] when in the decoding process s/he acknowledges the processual emergence of understanding (see in Lotman: "when the constructional nature of one of the basic structural levels becomes absolutely clear to the audience", Lotman 1977: 74). (Kroó 2021: 217-218)

When someone's distinct style or habitual artistic technique becomes common knowledge and easily imitated.

If this is to be taken into consideration - and Jakobson does so - then Lotman's covert critique of Jakobson in arguing against the possibility of the clear-cut and unambiguous opposition of the concepts of selection and combination in their pure forms proves even more correct, since Jakobson's definition supposes the activity of simultaneity and succession as the most essential criterion for differentiating the two basic verbal operations. [...] This is similar to the repudiation by Linda R. Waugh of the possible interpretation of Jakobson's definition of the six functions implied within the speech event, if taken in an "isolationist" way: "it is the relations of the major functions which are relevant, rather than any absolute and isolationist definition of any particular function" (Waugh 1985: 145). (Kroó 2021: 219)

It looks like Waugh made the point about the dynamics of linguistic functions, which I've been harping on about throughout this post, over 35 years ago.

It is just these intermediary formations which introduce a further criterion of binarity to Jakobson's typology of aphasia, sequentiality and concurrence: "Consequently, a second dichotomy is operative - the opposition of sequence and concurrence or, in Saussure's terminology (see 1922: 115, 180) successivity and simultaneity - which in turn divides the six types of impairments into two threefold groups" (Jakboson 1971g[1963]: 301; Jakobson's italitcs - K. K.). (Kroó 2021: 220)

Another experiment to be undertaken: to analyse the six speech functions from the standpoint of successivity and simultaneity, rather than simply code and message. Not sure if there's something there but it's an idea to put to the test. This paper was so thick that I'll necessarily have to re-read it at some point.

Rebane, Rasmus 2021. The context of Jakobson's phatic function. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 227-244.

As the most popular and productive conception of phaticity, Jakobson's phatic function deserves special attention and admiration. It is the author's hope that what little reliable historical context this paper has provided will go towards refining future "phaticities" with an improved sense of the sheer possibilities it offers to a theoretical mind. Subsequent publications will attempt similar contextualization for the above-mentioned conceptions. (Rebane 2021: 242)

LOL. Keep at it, buddy. I want to read that s***.

Boyko, Taras 2021. Roman Jakobson and Estonia. In: Sütiste, Elin; Gramigna, Remo; Griffin, Jonathan; Salupere, Silvi (eds.), (Re)considering Roman Jakobson. Tartu Semiotics Library 23. Tartu: University of Tartu Press, 245-258.

When a humanities scholars reaches a certain level of academic recognition and scholarly fame, he or she might find themselves in a bit of an unusual role - suddenly it is they who become an object of someone else's research and academic interest. Their students, or just colleagues of a "younger" generation, start looking up various episodes of their biography, analyse in depth one or another idea expressed by such a renowned professor, draw some academic comparisons and so on. And once all this happens, there often works a rule - the more unusual/unknown the "discovered" biographical detail or scholarly idea, the better. In the current article I will try to follow a somewhat similar research logic - to investigate microhistoric episodes of Roman Osipovich Jakobson's life related to his visits to Estonia. (Boyko 2021: 245)

This is an intimately familiar problem. Should I continue being intellectually active for 60 years, I may bypass this possibility by having all of my influences laid bare in this blog. No-one will have to expend more than a minute to find where I got an idea from, and consequently I'll be thoroughly uninteresting for people like myself who revel in finding unusual or surprising connections. That, I postulate, would be one of the benefits on complete transparency. The downsides I've not yet encountered, though surely there must be some.

In one of his last research projects - "Хроника русской культурной и общественной жизни в Эстонии (1918-1940) [Chronicle of Russian cultural and social life in Estonia (1918-1940)]" - Tartu professor Sergei Issakov mentions the name of Roman Jakobson on two occasions. The first time it appears is under the entry date early February, 1920, appearing [|] for the second time a few months later - early June, 1920. In both instances, information about Jakobson's visits is rather scarce (although this is not a surprise taking into account the format of the Chronicle), so Issakov's notes hardly can tell us much besides the simple confirmation of the fact that Jakobson was indeed in Estonia for some time in between February and July 1920. (Boyko 2021: 245-246)

Confirmed! Estonians can now claim Roman Jakobson as our own, like Mena Suvari. (This is a joke.)

According to these invaluable memories, the whole story behind Roman Osipovich's visits to Estonia started around late December 1919. At that time, he was giving lectures in Petrograd for OPOYAZ, but for the holiday (New Year), he had plans to come back home to Moscow. However, before he left the "northern capital", one of Jakobson's friends (Nadezhda Friedland) asked him to pass along a letter to a person in Moscow whose name was Gennadij Janov (Геннадий Янов), apparently a common acquaintance. This comrade Janov at the time held some high position in the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs [Народный Комиссариат по Иностранным Делам], so [|] in order to pass along the letter, Jakobson had to visit the Commissariat. The "fateful" meeting between the two happened sometime in early January, and according to Jakobson, immediately after reading the letter Janov a bit unexpectedly asked Jakobson, "А что Вы, Рома, делаете?" [Roman, what are you doing [currently]?]. Jakobson replied that he worked at the university but at the moment was also in search of some sort of additional income. Once Janov heard such an answer, he asked back, "Слушайте, вы не хотите за границу?" [Listen, do you want to go abroad?]. For Jakobson it seemed to be a weird question, since it was the time of the full blockade. So the young scholar asked, "Какая заграница?" [Abroad where?]. "Ревель" [Reval], replied Janov. Next Jakobson remembers that he rather bluntly noted, "Ну, это не слишком заграница... Ну что ж, я бы не отказался но когда и как?" [Well, it's not exactly overseas destination... Though, I wouldn't refuse, but when and how?]. As a reply to his question, Roman Osipovich heard "Нам нужен человек, знающий языки, туда едем наше первое представительство" [We need a person who knows foreign languages, our first delegation is going there]. (Boyko 2021: 247-248)

"On February 2, the Tartu peace treaty between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and Estonia was signed, so probably the organization of the first mission was a part of the political agreement between the countries." (ibid., 248, footnote 13)

The biography of Roman Jakobson over the next couple decades after the summer of 1920 can somewhat remind us of a good movie plot - very productive scholarly work in the interwar Czechoslovakia (first of all in connection to the so-called Prague Linguistic Circle), forced wandering around [|] Europe related to the start of WWII and finally an escape to the United States. Then trying to settle down in North America and slowly getting back into the scholarly work, while eventually also finding his way not only back to Europe (Jakobson was a frequent guest at many academic events held in Western and Central Europe in the 1950s-1970s), but even back to his native Russia (Soviet Union). (Boyko 2021: 250-251)

One may only hope that, given more of such microhistorical studies, we may one day see such a movie.

A rather detailed source of information about Jakobson's stay in the USSR during the month of August is Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov's memoir "О Романе Якобсоне [About Roman Jakobson]" (Ivanov 1999). Ivanov was not only a long time acquaintance of Jakobson (they first met during Jakobson's visit to the USSR in 1956) but also turned out to be a guide accompanying "Americans" for the majority of their stay in the Soviet Union. (Boyko 2021: 252)

I've been vaguely aware of this connection, i.e. about Ivanov employing Jakobson's scheme of linguistic functions very early, before the "Closing statement" in 1960. It is not out of the question that Ivanov had access to the manuscript of "Metalanguage as a Linguistic Problem" (1976e) before anyone in the West (aside from, perhaps, Morris Halle).

In Kääriku, due to the special decree of the Tartu University rector (Feodor Klement), the Jakobsons were given the only "city type" flat, while all the other participants of the summer school had to bunk up in the dorm-like conditions of the university sports centre. Vyacheslav Ivanov notes that immediately after their arrival, Roman Jakobson actively joined session discussions and had something to say as a follow up to almost all the presentations; however, the American professor dedicated some very special attention to the presentation of Isaac Revzin and his future wife, Olga (Karpinskaya). (Boyko 2021: 253)

Makes sense. One fact I haven't seen anyone pay any attention is that "Closing statement" is not Jakobson's sole contribution to Style in Language (Sebeok ed., 1960) - his remarks conclude many presentations.

Another relatively minor but nevertheless interesting detail to finish with the Jakobson-Lotman topic is that according to Egorov (Egorov 1999: 140), it was Roman Jakobson who was responsible for inclusion of Juri Lotman into the organizing committee of the International Association of Semiotics in 1969 (obviously Lotman "participated" only in absentia, but still). Once Jakobson passed away in 1982, Juri Lotman published an obituary for Roman Osipovich in the major Estonian journal Keel ja Kirjandus [Language and Literature] (Lotman 1983). (Boyko 2021: 256)

An interesting tidbit indeed. I have wondered why Lotman was listed in the editorial board of Semiotica from the very beginning. Good paper - should be read, like Sebeok's "Estonian connection", by every student of semiotics at Tartu.

| Labels: , , , ,

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)