The notion of distinctive features influenced generative phonology and other approaches in the 1960s, although Jakobson’s contributions are not always acknowledged. Jakobson resolved phonemes into bundles of hierarchically organized distinctive features, emphasizing acoustic over articulatory definitions, in which one member has default or “unmarked” status relative to the other. A second theme was his work in phonology, especially in his collaboration with fellow Russian émigré and Prague Circle member Nikolai Trubetzkoy (b. 1890–d. 1938). Much of his attention went to close linguistic analysis of literature, with a special focus on the formal linguistic features and sound patterns of poetry. Working steadily into his eighties through these successive dislocations, Jakobson produced a flood of texts and lectures addressed to diverse audiences, often coauthored with colleagues or former students. Following his immigration to America in 1941, Jakobson co-founded the Linguistic Circle of New York and taught at the French-Belgian university in exile, the École Libre des Hautes Études, before joining the faculty of Columbia University (in 1946), Harvard (in 1949), and MIT (in 1957, concurrent with his appointment at Harvard). In 1926, he co-founded the Prague Linguistic Circle, which developed a distinctive response to the structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure (b. 1857–d. 1913) that was then spreading across Europe. In a first and formative instance, Jakobson was a precocious member of the avant garde literary-artistic Futurist movement in Moscow in the 1910s. He participated avidly in a succession of scholarly collaboratives which generated ideas about language and literature that radiated outward to other thinkers and disciplines. Jakobson was a dynamic and protean scholar, who wrote about Poetics, Phonology, historical linguistics (especially Slavic), morphosyntax, semiotics, psycholinguistics, and cultural and literary history. However, his intellectual contributions far exceed the intersection of the two terms of his self-description. Period.” He arranged for his gravestone to be engraved simply with the words “Roman Jakobson- RUSSKIJ FILOLOG.” Jakobson’s Russianness, and his love of language and literature, are beyond dispute. Roman Osipovich Jakobson (1896–1982) famously characterized himself as a “Russian philologist.
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