Roman Jakobson Two Aspects of Language

Jakobson's 6 factors of language:

  CONTEXT
ADDRESSER MESSAGE  ADDRESSEE
  CONTACT
   CODE

He describes them like so:

The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to (the 'referent' in another, somewhat ambiguous nomenclature), graspable by the ADDRESSEE, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and ADDRESSEE (or in other words, to the encoder and decorder of the message); and, finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the ADDRESSER and the ADDRESSEE, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication (1260-1261).

Each verbal message includes all of these, but there may be difference of "hierarchical order" of functions -- which does not mean temporal order. J goes on to differentiate a new logical dimension of functions.

• Referential -- denotative, cognitive


• Emotive -- expressive


• Conative -- Orientation toward the addressee , vocative, imperative,


• Phatic -- like fingering online. To get a response to see if one's there.


• Metalingual -- glossing, about the lexical code.


• Poetic -- message itself (!?)

To continue ----

"The poetic function is not the sole functin of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, wheras in all otehr verbval activities it acts as a subsideariy, accessory constitutent" (1264).

: cola: Sections of a sentence or rhythmical period (plural of colon).

"What is the indespensible feature inherent in any piece of poetry? To answer this question we must recall the two basic modes of arrangement used in verbal behavior, selction and combination. If 'child' is the topic, of the message, the speakers selects one among the extant, more or less similar nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all fo them equivalent in a certan respect, and them, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semanticaly cognate vebs, sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection is produced on teh basis of equvalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy, while the combination, the build-up of he sequence, si based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the consititutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is wqualized with any other syllable of the same sequence; word stress is assumed to equal word stress, as unstress equals unstress; prosodic long is matched with long, and short with short; word boundary equals word boundary, no boundary equals no boundary; syntacti pause equals syntactic puase, no pause equals no pause. Syllables are converted into untits o measure, and so are morae or stresses.

It may be objected that metalanguage also makes a sequential use of equivalent units when combining synonymic expressions into an equational sentnece: A = A (Mare is the female of the horse). Poetry and metalonguage, however, are in diamtericla opposition to each other: in metalanguage theseqence is used to build an equation, whereas i poetry the equation is used to build a sequence. (1265).

This was all part of a summation Jakobson wrote in 1960, for Sebeok's journal.

Jakobson also divided speech acts into "verbal levels" morphemic, lexical, syntactic, and phraseological -- commenting that in these "either of these two relations (similarity and contiguity [metaphor or metonymy, he otherwise puts it]) can appear" (1266).

So that makes for another logical dimension to J's analysis. By his construction, we make more or less symmetrical recursive analyses based on factors including said contiguity or similarities happening at various segment-units of grammatical construction such as a poet might label morpheme | word | phrase | line | stanza | canto. I'm interested that J uses pretty much the same divisions I used for my analysis of complexity with John Heywood a couple of years back. A correspondence with Chomsky's branching constructions can also be drawn. Chomsky draws the recursions as moving from smaller constructions outward, which seems correct except that a running contextual factor is maintained, what Iser calls a "background" (Iser, Wolfgang. "Interaction Between Text and Reader." Norton THEORY AND CRITICISM.)

Jakobson's response to graphic art reveals something about his metonymic and metaphoric.

. . . the manifestly metonymical orientation of Cubism, where the object is transfomed into a set of synecdoches; the Surrealist painters responded with a patently metaphorical attitude. Ever since the productions of D.W. Griffith, the art of cinema, with its highly developed capacityfor changing the angle, the perspective, and focus of shots, has broken with the tradition of the theater and ranged an unprecedented variety of synechdochic close-ups and metonymic set-ups in general. In such motion pictures as those of Charlie Chaplin and Esenstein, these devices in turn were overlaid by a novel, metaphoric montage with its lap dissolves -- the filmic similes" (1267).

Interestingly, he goes on to describe similarly structured observations in Freud's work with dreams (displacement or condensation metonymic, identification and symbolism metaphoric) -- also in Frazer's Golden Bough, in the classification of magic into homeopathic or imitative and contagious or, in Jakobson's terms, contiguous magic.

Now, to the extent that qualities were represented spatiotemporally, both would be spatially mediated by almost the same mechanisms. Hmn . . .