Important Figures in Linguistics - Roman Jakobson and Paul Grice

Roman Jakobson

    

    Roman Jakobson was born in Russia in 1896. He was a Russian American linguist and a pioneer of structural linguistics. He served as a professor in 1933, in a university of Czech. In 1941 he became a professor at Columbia University.

    With his colleagues in Prague, he developed a hypothesis that there is such a term as "distinctive feature" such as aspirated/unaspirated or voiced/unvoiced. He made contributions to Slavic linguistics as well. Besides, he had writings about words, phonology, language, grammar, and Slavic epic studies. His studies helped others found the phonology.

     

    Roman Jakobson followed the way of Ferdinand de Saussure and focused on language's structure, and he developed the approach structuralism pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure. He was an important figure for others regarding the adaptation of structural analysis to disciplines other than linguistics, such as anthropology. Also, he impressed Noam Chomsky's early thinking, especially the theory of distinctive features. Last but not least, when American authorities tried to deport Roman Jakobson, Franz Boas was the one who saved his life.

 

Paul Grice

    Paul Grice was a British philosopher, and he was an important figure in philosophy in the 20th century. He studied in many areas of philosophy, and he wrote about history and its figures, such as Hume, Kant, and Aristotle.

  

    He made contributions to language and linguistics as well. His work, Studies in the Way of Words, was published after his death, and it was about the philosophy of language. Although his work was about language and its philosophy, it supported ethics, metaphysics, and the study of Aristotle and Kant.

    

    Paul Grice claimed there is a distinction between the utterance of a speaker and the other meanings by the utterance of the same speaker in other contexts. This was, after some time, called semantic and pragmatic meaning. Also, he distinguished the meaning and use of a sentence, and this has found many utilizations in linguistics. Lastly, his studies helped others to found the discipline of language and linguistics named as "pragmatics."

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