Question of Jakobson's "Linguistics and Poetics."

[David Goldfarb]

Amanda, et al.,

I usually like to assign that essay along with Jakobson's essay, "The
Dominant," and I think that might clarify the question a bit.  

I think that Jakobson would say that all six factors are present in
communication in some sense (ambiguities being along the lines of:  what
if the authorship of the message is unclear?  what if a message is sent
into the void with seemingly no implied or actual addressee?  what about
sound poems, such as Jakobson himself wrote, that attempted to avoid being
written in any sort of language or code?  How do we account for private
thoughts and memories or are they just not communication?  what about
utterances like performatives that have no context/referent/signified?),
but that the six functions of communication (and ambiguities like those
mentioned above) are rarely ever absolute.  

That is to say, while all six factors of communication are generally
present, the dominant factor may determine the dominant function.  
Contact is necessary for communication between an addresser and an
addressee, for instance, but the mere fact of contact does not make the
dominant function of the communication phatic.

I think we are in agreement, and you might ask your colleague to come up
with examples where one factor is entirely absent.  The ambiguous cases
mentioned above might constitute such examples, but I don't know that
Jakobson would have admitted of such counterexamples at the time he wrote
the essay.  The question of what Jakobson intended is a different one from
the question of whether Jakobson was right.

David A. Goldfarb
Assistant Professor
Department of Slavic Languages
Barnard College
Columbia University
3009 Broadway                           dgoldfarb at barnard.edu
New York, NY 10027-6598                 http://www.echonyc.com/~goldfarb

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005, Amanda Ewington wrote:

> Hello SEELANGers,
> 
> I have a question for the linguists out there or anyone who knows their 
> Jakobson.
> 
> I am sitting in on a Semiotics class, taught by a colleague of mine 
> from the French department.  When reading Jakobson's "Linguistics and 
> Poetics" we had a disagreement over the following passage:
> 
> "Language must be investigated in all the variety of its functions. 
> Before discussing the poetic function we must define its place among 
> the other functions of language. An outline of these functions demands 
> a concise survey of the constitutive factors in any speech event, in 
> any act of verbal communication. The ADDRESSER sends a MESSAGE to the 
> ADDRESSEE. To be operative the message requires a CONTEXT referred to 
> (‘referent’ in another, somewhat ambiguous, nomenclature), seizable by 
> the addressee, and either verbal or capable of being verbalized; a CODE 
> fully, or at least partially, common to the addresser and addressee (or 
> 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."
> 
> I thought this passage quite clearly indicated Jakobson's contention  
> that ANY speech event must have these six factors (with an explanation, 
> later in the essay,  that the emphasis on one particular element in a 
> given speech act can make the message, "phatic" or "poetic," etc).  My 
> colleague insists that Jakobson is trying to say only that any speech 
> act  MAY have any of these 6 elements, but need not contain all six.
> 
> I am certainly prepared to eat humble pie, but would like some outside 
> input on the question.
> 
> Thanks so much!
> 
> Amanda Ewington
> -----------------------------------------------
> Amanda Ewington, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor of Russian
> Davidson College
> Department of German and Russian
> Box 6936
> Davidson, NC 28035-6936
> tel:  (704)894-2397
> fax: (704)894-2782
> amewington at davidson.edu
> http://www.davidson.edu/russian/index.htm
> 
> Courier:
> 209 Ridge Road
> Davidson, NC 28036
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