Podcast on Roman Jakobson: Language Structure and Functions

Kapitoly

Two Programs, One Brain

The Similarity Disorder

The Writer Who Split in Two

A Universal Pattern

A Game of Choice

The Common Code

Pig or Fig?

The Rules of the Game

An Ascending Scale of Freedom

Two Ways of Looking at It

Contiguity and Similarity

Poetics as a Science

Beyond Just Words

Scholar vs. Critic

The Communication Blueprint

The Two Poles of Language

Language in Art and Aphasia

Beyond Words and Final Thoughts

Přepis

Ethan: So you’re telling me our brains are constantly juggling two completely different operations just to form a sentence?

Emma: Exactly! One is for selecting the right word, and the other is for combining it with other words. It’s a constant balancing act!

Ethan: That is mind-blowing. Okay, you are listening to Studyfi Podcast, and today we’re diving deep into the fascinating world of aphasia, which is what happens when that balancing act goes wrong.

Emma: It really is. Think of it this way: when you want to talk about a dog, your brain performs a ‘selection’ operation. It scans a mental list of similar concepts—dog, puppy, canine, pooch—and picks the best one.

Ethan: Okay, so that’s the ‘what’. Picking the right ingredient from the pantry.

Emma: Precisely. The second operation is ‘combination’. That’s where your brain arranges the word you picked into a sentence based on grammar and context, like “The dog is barking.” It connects words that are next to each other. That's the ‘how’.

Ethan: So, selection is based on similarity, and combination is based on… well, combination.

Emma: You got it. It's based on contiguity—things being next to each other. Every single thing you say uses both. But in certain types of aphasia, one of those abilities gets seriously impaired.

Ethan: So what happens when the ‘selection’ part breaks? The part that deals with similarity?

Emma: That leads to a condition we can call a ‘similarity disorder’. A person with this type of aphasia loses the ability to substitute one word for another. Metaphors become almost impossible for them to understand.

Ethan: Wow. So telling them “it’s raining cats and dogs” would just be… confusing?

Emma: Extremely confusing! They would probably look outside for actual animals falling from the sky. They can’t make that imaginative leap based on similarity. Their thinking becomes very literal and grounded in context.

Ethan: Give me another example. How does this play out?

Emma: There’s a classic line from a Russian folktale that illustrates it perfectly: “Thomas is a bachelor; Jeremiah is unmarried.” For us, that’s just a funny, repetitive way of saying two guys are single. The humor comes from the similarity—the two synonymous phrases.

Ethan: Right, 'bachelor' and 'unmarried' are basically the same concept.

Emma: Exactly. But someone with a similarity disorder would struggle with that. They might see Thomas and Jeremiah as two completely separate facts, unable to connect the underlying shared meaning. The link of similarity is broken.

Ethan: That feels so abstract. Is there a real-world case of this?

Emma: Oh, there's a really famous one. A 19th-century Russian writer named Gleb Ivanovič Uspenskij. In the later years of his life, he developed a speech disorder.

Ethan: And what happened?

Emma: Well, in Russia, it's common to address someone politely using their first name and their patronymic, which is derived from their father's name. So, people would call him “Gleb Ivanovič.”

Ethan: Two names, one person. Makes sense.

Emma: Not to him. His brain could no longer process that two different symbols—“Gleb” and “Ivanovič”—could refer to the same entity. He developed a split personality based on his own name.

Ethan: Wait, what? How?

Emma: He decided that ‘Gleb’ was his good side, full of all his virtues. But ‘Ivanovič,’ the name connecting him to his father, became the container for all his vices and flaws. They were two separate beings in his mind.

Ethan: That is absolutely wild. His inability to see the similarity—that both names meant *him*—literally split his personality.

Emma: Exactly. And here's the kicker. Researchers went back and looked at his writing style from before he got sick. Guess what they found?

Ethan: I’m on the edge of my seat here.

Emma: He had a massive preference for metonymy. That’s the literary device based on contiguity, on connecting things that are physically or conceptually next to each other. His writing was so packed with tiny, connected details that readers often lost sight of the bigger picture.

Ethan: So his brain was already wired to prefer combination over selection, contiguity over similarity, long before his illness manifested.

Emma: It seems so. His natural style was a preview of how his brain would later break down.

Ethan: This feels bigger than just language. This whole similarity versus contiguity thing… does it show up anywhere else?

Emma: Everywhere! Think about magic. The anthropologist James Frazer divided magic into two types. ‘Imitative magic,’ like a voodoo doll, works on similarity—the doll looks *like* the person.

Ethan: Okay, I’m with you.

Emma: And the other is ‘contagious magic,’ which uses things that were once in physical contact with a person, like a lock of their hair. That’s pure contiguity.

Ethan: Similarity and contiguity again. So this really is a fundamental pattern of human thought. That’s incredible, and it gives us a whole new way to understand how language works… and how it can be repaired.

Ethan: So that's the absolute bedrock of how we transfer thoughts... but it feels like there's more to it than just sending signals. It's not just a stream of consciousness, right? There's a system at play.

Emma: Exactly! And that's where we get into what linguists call the twofold character of language. It sounds complicated... but it's really just two basic operations we do all the time without even thinking about it.

Ethan: Okay, I'm ready. What are they?

Emma: Selection and combination. That’s it. That’s the entire game. First, you select a linguistic piece, like a word. Then, you combine it with other pieces to make something bigger, like a sentence.

Ethan: So, pick a Lego brick, then stick it to another Lego brick?

Emma: Precisely! You select a word from your mental dictionary, and then you combine it with others following the rules of grammar. Sentences get combined into paragraphs, and paragraphs into a whole conversation.

Ethan: Okay, that makes sense. But when you say we 'select' words, we can't just pick any word we want, can we? It feels like the choices are... pre-approved.

Emma: That's a perfect way to put it. You're not a completely free agent. Your selection has to come from a lexical storehouse... a vocabulary that you and the person you're talking to both share.

Ethan: Ah, so we're both pulling from the same box of Legos.

Emma: Exactly. Communication engineers have a great term for this. They say for information to be exchanged well, the speaker and listener need to have the same “filing cabinet of prefabricated representations.”

Ethan: A filing cabinet! I like that. So I pull out the 'dog' file, and you pull out the exact same 'dog' file, and we both know what we’re talking about.

Emma: You got it. The whole system only works because we're using a common code. The efficiency of a speech event depends on it. We've both agreed on what the pieces are and, roughly, how they can be used.

Ethan: So this applies all the way down, not just to words?

Emma: All the way down to the most basic sounds. Lewis Carroll had a great example of this in *Alice in Wonderland*. The Cheshire Cat asks Alice, “Did you say *pig* or *fig*?”

Ethan: Classic. A very important distinction to make.

Emma: A very important one! Alice had to clarify her choice. In English, the difference between that 'p' sound—a stop—and the 'f' sound—a continuant—completely changes the meaning of the message.

Ethan: Right, one is a farm animal, the other is a fruit. Completely different files in the cabinet.

Emma: And think about what that 'p' sound even is. It's not just one thing. It’s a bundle of what we call distinctive features. It's a stop, it has a certain gravity, it's tense... all happening at the exact same moment.

Ethan: Whoa. So a single letter sound is actually a combo deal of smaller features?

Emma: That's the one. The phoneme /p/ is a bundle of simultaneous features. And then you combine that bundle with the /i/ bundle and the /g/ bundle... and you get the word /pɪɡ/.

Ethan: My brain hurts a little. But that's so cool! It's combinations within combinations.

Emma: It is! Concurrence of simultaneous things, and concatenation of successive things. Those are the two ways we combine everything in language, from the tiniest sound feature to the biggest story.

Ethan: Okay, so if these phoneme-bundles like /p/ and /f/ are prefabricated, does that mean we can't just invent new ones?

Emma: For the most part, no. As a speaker, you didn't invent the phoneme /p/, and you can't just use it whenever you want. The code of English sets limits on how it can be combined with other phonemes.

Ethan: So I can say 'pig' but probably not 'pfkig'.

Emma: Probably not. 'Pfkig' isn't a pre-approved combination. When it comes to the basic building blocks, we're word *users*, not word *coiners*. We expect words to be pre-coded units.

Ethan: Like the word 'nylon'. You can't guess its meaning. You just have to know that our shared code assigns 'nylon' to that specific synthetic material.

Emma: Exactly. And this even applies to some groups of words, like idioms. If you hear *how do you do*, you can't just add up the meaning of 'how' and 'do' and 'you' and 'do'.

Ethan: Right, that would be a very confusing question. The whole phrase has its own special file in the cabinet.

Emma: It does. But here's the key takeaway: that kind of fixed phrase is actually pretty rare. For most word groups, if you know the words and the syntax rules, you can understand a sentence you've never, ever heard before.

Ethan: So it sounds like there are different levels of rules. Some are strict, and some are more like guidelines.

Emma: That's a fantastic way to think about it. There's an ascending scale of freedom in how we combine linguistic units.

Ethan: Okay, break that down for me. What's at the bottom of the scale?

Emma: At the very bottom, you have the combination of distinctive features into phonemes. Like making the /p/ sound. Your freedom there is zero. The code has already established every possible sound bundle in the language.

Ethan: Can't argue with that. I can't just decide to make a new vowel sound and expect people to understand me.

Emma: Not without a lot of practice, no. Then, moving up, you have combining phonemes into words. Your freedom here is *almost* zero. It's limited to the rare case of coining a new word.

Ethan: Like 'google' becoming a verb. It can happen, but it's not something I do every day.

Emma: Right. Now, when you start forming sentences with words, you're much less constrained. You can put words together in new ways all the time, as long as you follow the basic grammar.

Ethan: And at the very top?

Emma: At the top is combining sentences into utterances or full conversations. Here, the compulsory syntactic rules basically stop, and your freedom to create novel contexts increases substantially. You can say something that has never been said before in the history of the universe!

Ethan: Wow. So we're constantly moving between total rigidity and near-total freedom. How did linguists even figure this out?

Emma: Well, a lot of this goes back to Ferdinand de Saussure. He really nailed down these two modes of arrangement: combination and selection.

Ethan: The two things we started with!

Emma: The very same. He had a great way to distinguish them. He said combination happens *in presentia*—it's based on two or more things being jointly present in an actual sentence.

Ethan: *In presentia*. So, 'in its presence'. The words are physically there, next to each other.

Emma: Yep. He said selection, on the other hand, connects terms *in absentia*—as members of a virtual, memorized list in your head.

Ethan: *In absentia*... 'in its absence'. So, all the words that *could have been* there, but weren't. Like choosing 'cat' instead of 'dog' or 'hamster' or 'iguana'.

Emma: You've got it. So, to put it simply, selection deals with things connected in the code, but not in the message you actually speak. Combination deals with things connected in the message itself.

Ethan: Okay, so every time I say something, the listener is hearing the combination, but they're also aware of the selections I didn't make.

Emma: That's the magic of it. The parts of your sentence are in a state of *contiguity*—they're touching, they're next to each other. That's the combination part.

Ethan: Contiguity. I like that word. It sounds like 'contiguous'.

Emma: It's the same root. But in the background, in that virtual list, the words you could have chosen are linked by *similarity*. That's the selection part.

Ethan: How so? What kind of similarity?

Emma: It can be different kinds. Synonyms are very similar, like 'big' and 'large'. But even antonyms, like 'hot' and 'cold', are linked by the similarity of being opposites on the same scale of temperature.

Ethan: That is fascinating! So every single sign, every word, is being interpreted in two ways at once. One is its relationship to the code—what it *could* have been—and the other is its relationship to the context—what it's sitting next to.

Emma: And that is the beautiful, constant dance of language. It's this interplay between a fixed menu of choices and the infinite ways we can combine them. It's how we can have a shared system but still create endless novelty.

Ethan: So to recap, language is a system of selection from a shared code, and combination into new messages. And our freedom to do this increases as we go from tiny sounds all the way up to full conversations. What an elegant system.

Emma: It truly is. And understanding this duality is the key to unlocking so many other linguistic concepts, including how language can sometimes break down...

Ethan: ...so that really changes how you look at the structure of language itself. But that brings us to Roman Jakobson, who took this idea of structure into a field I think most of us see as totally separate.

Emma: Right! He took it straight into the world of art and literature.

Ethan: Exactly. He asked a question that seems simple but is incredibly deep: What makes a verbal message a work of art?

Emma: And his answer was poetics. He argued that poetics is the study of that very question.

Ethan: Okay, poetics. When I hear that, I think of analyzing poetry, maybe rhyme and meter. Stuff from English class.

Emma: That's part of it! But for Jakobson, it was much bigger. He believed poetics was a crucial, integral part of linguistics.

Ethan: Wait, part of linguistics? Like, the scientific study of language? That feels... odd. Art and science are usually in different buildings on campus.

Emma: They are! But his logic is pretty solid. If linguistics is the global science of verbal structure, and poetics deals with the structure of verbal *art*... then poetics has to be a branch of linguistics.

Ethan: Okay, I see the connection. But what about stories that jump mediums? You can turn a book like *Wuthering Heights* into a movie, or the *Iliad* into a comic book.

Emma: A very, very long comic book.

Ethan: Right! The words are gone, but the story's structure is still there. Doesn't that prove it’s about more than just language?

Emma: That's a great point, and Jakobson totally agreed. He said those features belong to the whole theory of signs, or what's called general semiotics.

Ethan: Semiotics... the study of signs and symbols. Got it.

Emma: Exactly. A film uses visual signs, a book uses verbal ones. But he says this doesn't disqualify poetics from linguistics. Why? Because language *itself* shares properties with other sign systems. It’s not a contradiction, it's just acknowledging a bigger picture.

Ethan: So, a story's plot is a type of structure—a sign—that can be translated. But the way the words are used in the original book is *also* a structure, and that's the domain of linguistics and poetics.

Emma: You nailed it. That's the core idea. One doesn't cancel out the other.

Ethan: So, is poetics then about... evaluation? Is it about saying, "This poem is good, and this one is bad?"

Emma: Ah, the million-dollar question. Jakobson pushes back hard on this. He really disliked the confusion between literary *studies* and literary *criticism*.

Ethan: What’s the difference in his mind?

Emma: He said that any investigator of literature should be like a linguist, not a 'grammatical critic'. A linguist describes how language works; they don't just write a rulebook about what's 'proper' English.

Ethan: So a literary scholar's job isn't to be a judge with a gavel, deciding what's good or bad.

Emma: Exactly! No gavels allowed. Their job is to be a detective, figuring out the intrinsic values and structures of the work itself. Subjective taste is a different conversation.

Ethan: That makes sense. It’s about objective analysis, not just a thumbs-up or thumbs-down review.

Emma: And to do that analysis, he said we first have to understand the blueprint of any verbal communication. He broke it down into six essential factors.

Ethan: Okay, let's hear them.

Emma: First, you have the ADDRESSER. That's the sender.

Ethan: The person talking or writing. Me, right now.

Emma: Yep. The addresser sends a MESSAGE...

Ethan: The words I'm saying.

Emma: ...to an ADDRESSEE.

Ethan: The listener. You, or our audience.

Emma: Perfect. Now, for that message to work, it needs a CONTEXT to refer to—the topic you're talking about.

Ethan: Our context right now is Roman Jakobson and poetics.

Emma: Exactly. Then you need CONTACT. That's the physical channel and psychological connection. For us, it's our microphones, the internet, your headphones... the whole link between us.

Ethan: And the last one?

Emma: The CODE. The shared language. In this case, English. We both have to understand the code for the message to be decoded.

Ethan: So, to recap: Addresser, Addressee, Message, Context, Contact, and Code. That’s the complete package for any speech event.

Emma: It is. And here's the brilliant part. Jakobson argued that each of those six factors determines a different *function* of language.

Ethan: A different function... okay, you can't just leave us hanging there! What are these functions?

Ethan: So that's how syntax provides the skeleton. But for our last topic, let's talk about the... the personality of language. How we actually choose which words to use.

Emma: Exactly. And it basically boils down to two different ways of thinking. Two semantic lines or 'poles' as the linguist Roman Jakobson called them.

Ethan: Two poles? Like the North and South Pole?

Emma: Sort of! Think of them as two opposite gravitational forces in our brain. One pole is based on **similarity**, and the other is based on **contiguity**.

Ethan: Okay, contiguity... that means things that are next to each other, or associated, right?

Emma: You got it. The similarity pole gives us **metaphor**. We substitute one thing for another because they're alike. Like saying 'love is a journey.'

Ethan: And the contiguity pole?

Emma: That gives us **metonymy**. We refer to something by mentioning something closely associated with it. Like when a reporter says, 'The Crown has issued a statement.'

Ethan: They don't mean the literal hat is talking.

Emma: Exactly. They mean the monarchy, which is associated with the crown. One is about substitution, the other is about connection.

Ethan: The wild part is how this shows up in aphasia—language disorders from brain injury.

Emma: It's fascinating! Some people with aphasia lose their ability for similarity. They can't process metaphors. Everything is literal.

Ethan: So 'it's raining cats and dogs' would be... terrifying for them.

Emma: It would be very confusing! Others lose the sense of contiguity. They struggle to build sentences or connect related ideas in a sequence.

Ethan: So we all use both poles, but we tend to lean toward one. Like being right-handed or left-handed?

Emma: That's a great way to put it! And this preference shows up everywhere, especially in art. The Romantics and Symbolists? All about metaphor. Big, sweeping comparisons.

Ethan: And the Realist writers?

Emma: They were masters of metonymy. Think of Tolstoy. In *Anna Karenina*'s suicide scene, he doesn't describe her inner turmoil... he focuses on her handbag.

Ethan: The handbag? Why?

Emma: Because the handbag is *part* of the scene. It's contiguous. He uses that small, real detail to represent the entire tragic moment. It's a powerful, metonymic move.

Ethan: And this isn't just in books, right? It's in film, painting...

Emma: Everywhere! Cubism, which breaks an object into its component parts, is super metonymic. But Surrealism, where a fish might swim through the sky? That's pure metaphor.

Ethan: Wow. So once you see it, you can't unsee it. It's a fundamental way we organize the world, through similarity or association.

Emma: That's the key takeaway. Metaphor and metonymy aren't just fancy literary terms. They are the two basic paths our thoughts can follow to make connections and create meaning.

Ethan: An incredible way to wrap up our discussion. From the basics of sound all the way to the building blocks of thought itself. Emma, this has been amazing. Thank you.

Emma: My pleasure, Ethan! It was a lot of fun.

Ethan: And a huge thank you to everyone listening to the Studyfi Podcast. We hope we've given you a new way to look at the language you use every day. Until next time, keep learning!