Books in the Sound and Meaning: The Roman Jakobson Series in Linguistics and Poetics series

Offers a new way of doing ethnography, based on an analysis of interaction between immigrants from a small village in Slovenia to the US and the culture they left.

Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. This title investigates the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of concern for literary theorists and critics as well as for linguists and psychologists.

Brings work in human cognition, behaviour, and communication to bear on the study of phonology. This book maintains that language in general and phonology in particular are instances of human cognitive behaviour and aims to provide a set of principles connecting the phylogeny, ontogeny, and pathology of sound systems in human language.

Jr N S Trubetzkoy (1890-1939) is generally celebrated as the creator of the science of phonology. This book contains articles and letters presenting Trubetzkoy's work in general and Indo-European linguistics. It offers a view of the evolution of Trubetzkoy's ideas on phonology, the logic in laws of linguistic geography and relative chronol.

Edna Andrews clarifies and extends the work of Roman Jakobson to develop a theory of invariants in language by distinguishing between general and contextual meaning in morphology and semantics. Markedness theory, as Jakobson conceived it, is a qualitative theory of oppositional binary relations. Andrews shows how markedness theory enables a linguist to precisely define the systemically given oppositions and hierarchies represented by linguistic categories. In addition, she redefines the relationship between Jakobsonian markedness theory and Peircean interpretants. Though primarily theoretical, the argument is illustrated with discussions about learning a second language, the relationship of linguistics to mathematics (particularly set theory, algebra, topology, and statistics) in their mutual pursuit of invariance, and issues involving grammatical gender and their implications in several languages.

Krystyna Pomorska (1928–1986), a noted specialist of Slavic literature and literary theory, is best known for her pioneering work in applying Roman Jakobson's theories of poetics to prose narratives. This collection draws together and makes accessible her writings over two decades (among them articles appearing in English for the first time), and treats a wide range of Slavic literary works, including Pushkin, Tolstoy, Pasternak, Chekov, and Solzhenitsyn, as well as examples from Polish and Ukrainian literature and folklore.Forming an intellectual and methodological whole, these essays reveal Pomorska's commitment to the principles of Jakobsonian poetics, her consistent application of these basic theoretical concepts to the analysis of literary works, and her interest in the foundations and history of literary criticism. Pomorska explores problems in both poetics (of prose as well as poetry) and literary theory, especially the relationship between biography and myth. In Krystyna Pomorska, structuralism found a most able practitioner, and Jakobson's oeuvre an authoritative exponent and interpreter. Her volume, a guidebook to a major strain in modern criticism, will be of great interest to a broad audience of literary theorists and students of Slavic literatures and literature in general.

""Modern Theories of Language" offers a wealth of material, suggesting new perspectives and proposing new solutions to problems that are at the center of contemporary linguistic research. The work represents a breakthrough in the impasse that characterizes the relationship between theoretical and descriptive linguistics and shows the way to a constructive combination of different approaches."--Henry Schogt, University of Toronto