Roman Jakobson was a Russian thinker who became one of the most influential linguists of the 20th century by pioneering the development of the structural analysis of language, poetry, and art.
The linguistics of the time was overwhelmingly neogrammarian and insisted that the only scientific study of language was to study the history and development of words across time.
Jakobson, on the other hand, had come into contact
with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and developed an approach focused on the way in which
language structure served its basic function - to communicate information
between speakers.
He was one of the founders of the "Prague school" of linguistic
theory.
According to
Jakobson, language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions.
An outline
of those functions demands a concise survey of the constitutive factors in any
speech event, in any act of verbal communication.
The
ADDRESSER [speaker, author] sends a MESSAGE [the verbal act, the signifier] to
the ADDRESSEE [the hearer or reader].
To be
operative the message requires a CONTEXT [a referent, the signified], seizable
by the addresses, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized;
a CODE
[shared mode of discourse, shared language] fully, or at least partially,
common to the addresser and the addressee (in other words, to the encoder and
decoder of the message);
and,
finally, a CONTACT, a physical channel and psychological connection between the
addresser and the addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in
communication.