Edmund Leach on Roman Jakobson's Contributions to Linguistics
New Books in Literary Studies
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Jakobson's Linguistics
Jakobson was instrumental in founding the Moscow Linguistics Circle, of which he was president from 1915 to 1920 as a young man. Jakobson's concern with poetic language has endured throughout his career. He knew that parrots do not use words in this way and that it is only in the artificial circumstances reduced by written texts or telephone conversation that language becomes a fully rational self-contained system of communication isolated from all other systems.
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