Roman Jakobson

Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist who, with the Moscow Linguistic Circle and later the Prague Circle, developed structuralist phonology and the theory of poetic function. Jakobson's six functions of language (referential, poetic, emotive, conative, phatic, metalingual) provided a structural framework for analyzing how any utterance simultaneously operates on multiple levels.

Jakobson's work on distinctive features in phonology — the minimal binary oppositions that differentiate phonemes — became a model for structural analysis across the humanities. His concept that aphasia types correspond to disruptions of specific linguistic oppositions demonstrated that structural relationships are not merely abstract but neurologically embodied.