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University Daily Kansan Wednesday, March 31, 1965
Linguist Says Modern Thought Should Use Language as Tool
The importance and enormous part which language has to play not only in linguistics but in present day logic and philosophy was stressed by Roman Jakobson in his lecture "The Quest for the Essence of Language."
Professor Jakobson, professor of linguistics and Slavie literature at Harvard and an institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke last night at the sixth lecture in the humanities series.
IN HIS LECTURE, Prof. Jakobson referred to the studies of an American, Charles Peirce, when he said, "I know of no scholar of such a wide scope of discoveries in so many fields."
"It is necessary to understand the relationship between the various types of signs and find the structural differences in the types of signs to understand language."
"Peirce was not afraid to attempt this despite the spirit of the late 19th century and to call the attention of his contemporaries to the great achievements of Medieval theories of language and signs. He showed that his theories were a continuation of ancient Greek philosophy of language," Prof. Jakobson said.
Jakobson defined language as a "tool or an instrument of communication. The question of how it works is one which only now begins to gain our attention.
"IT CAN BE SAID that language has an iconic character, if syntactical rules are analyzed they can be defined as a diagram," Prof. Jakobson said. "There is still a higher degree of grammatical nature. In Russian ka means little andvod means water but vodka does not mean a little water."
"EVERY SIGN has two parts; the signifier and the signified," he said, "The signifier is perceptible sounds; the idea behind the sounds is the signified."
"The signified is not always perceptible, but it is translatable. The relationship between these two parts has been discussed for centuries. Plato contended that there was an intrinsic relationship between the two, sound and meaning," Prof. Jakobson said.
an index to prove that a human being was on the island. Another example would be the statement that if there is smoke you know there is fire," he said.
"Many say that the relationship between the two is arbitrary, there is no intrinsic similarity whatsoever," Prof. Jakobson said. "According to Peirce there are three types of relationships, the index, the icon and the symbol. The foot-step seen by Robinson Crusoe is
"This has played an important role in the life of our language and the history of our words. This can be seen in emotional language and poetry," Prof. Jakobson said.
"There is a question as to wether the roots are related. There is a similarity of two words in sound which gives a feeling of similarity in meaning," he said.
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