Perhaps Roman Jakobson's most influential contribution to linguistics was his model of the six functions of language, which he elaborated most fully in his 1960 essay "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics." This framework revolutionized our understanding of communication by demonstrating that language serves multiple simultaneous purposes, each oriented toward a different element of the communicative situation.
Jakobson identified six constitutive factors in any speech event: the addresser (speaker), addressee (listener), message, context (referent), contact (physical and psychological connection), and code (shared language system). Corresponding to each factor is a distinct linguistic function. The referential function, oriented toward context, conveys information about the world. The emotive function expresses the speaker's attitude or emotional state. The conative function, directed at the addressee, attempts to influence behavior through imperatives or vocatives. These three functions had been recognized in classical rhetoric, but Jakobson's innovation was to identify three additional functions that had been systematically overlooked.
The Neglected Functions
The phatic function maintains social connection and ensures the communication channel remains open—think of "hello," "you know," or weather talk. The metalingual function allows language to talk about itself, as when we ask "What do you mean by that word?" But Jakobson's most celebrated contribution was his theorization of the poetic function, which focuses attention on the message itself, making language self-reflexive and foregrounding its formal properties.
Crucially, Jakobson argued that while one function typically dominates in any given utterance, all six functions are co-present to varying degrees. A poem primarily serves the poetic function but also conveys referential meaning and expresses emotion. Political rhetoric combines conative and emotive functions. This multifunctionality explained why communication is so complex and why different disciplines - linguistics, literary criticism, rhetoric - had developed such divergent approaches. Jakobson's model provided a unified framework that could accommodate this diversity while maintaining analytical rigor. The model has been applied far beyond linguistics, influencing communication theory, semiotics, anthropology, and media studies, demonstrating its remarkable explanatory power and theoretical flexibility.
