Roman Jakobson: Remarks on the phonological evolution of Russian in comparison with the other Slavic languages

Abstract

During the 1920s and 1930s, in the capital of the newly independent Czechoslovak Republic, a Russian émigré and his associates produced a wealth of such innovative studies on the workings of human language that today, nearly a century later, their influence continues to be felt across a range of disciplines. Roman Jakobson, together with his compatriot Nikolai Trubetzkoy, was the central figure in the Prague Linguistic Circle, which built upon the insights of Ferdinand de Saussure to make lasting contributions to structuralist linguistics, poetics, and literary theory.