к.ф.н., доцент Шингарева М.Ю., магистрант Жандарбекова А.

Региональный социально-инновационный университет

Jakobson’s Approach to Linguistic Analyses

In stylistics, the approach to an analysis is that of linguistics. In a first step, linguistic patterns of a text are identified. In a second step, these patterns are interpreted for their meanings. This distinguishes stylistics from literary criticism which prefers an intuitive approach and takes linguistic form to be of relatively little importance for the meanings of the text. But also within stylistics, there are different approaches to the systematic identification of linguistic patterns. These approaches differ in their analytic techniques and in their goals.

Following Jakobson's demand in his 'Closing statement' of 1958, one of the basic analytic principles in stylistics is that the syntagmatic axis of a text, as opposed to its paradigmatic axis, is analysed for linguistic patterns. Stylistics and much of linguistics in general follow this proposition, independent of whether prose or poetry is the object of an analysis. Jakobson himself only discusses the analysis of poetry in his statement. Nevertheless, his claims and theoretical insights are also highly relevant to prose and are therefore explained in some depth in the following paragraphs.

The starting point of Jakobson's statement is the different functions of language (emotive, referential, poetic, phatic, metalingual and conative) in a text. A literary text is characterized by the dominance of the poetic function. Unlike the other functions, the poetic function focuses on the message of a text. Therefore, the text's message is the main object of an analysis of a literary text, so that the focus of the analysis is self-referential as it is based solely on the text's literary character. The objects of the analysis are linguistic patterns in the text since, the repetitiveness effected by imparting the equivalence principle to the sequence makes reiterable not only the constituent sequences of the poetic message but the whole message as well. This capacity for reiteration whether immediate or delayed, this reification of a poetic message and its constituents, this conversion of a message into an enduring thing, indeed all this represents an inherent and effective property of poetry. [1, p.371]

Meaning in a literary text is created by recurrent linguistic patterns such as parallelisms, for example a rhyme scheme or recurrent grammatical patterns. The syntagmatic axis of a text encodes its meanings so that the syntagmatic axis is also the object of an analysis.

While the poetic function is the most dominant, the other five functions defined by Jakobson are also relevant for a literary text. However, their analysis is more prominent when looking at non-literary texts.

Since linguistic patterns are objective features of a text, Jakobson (1958) states that also the meaning of a text must be objective. Referring to the phonology of poems, Jakobson says that, sound symbolism is an undeniably objective connection between different sensory modes, in particular between the visual and the auditory experience. [1, p.372]

Consequently, poetics, which is what is called stylistics today, is 'an objective scholarly analysis of verbal art' [1, p.352] which analyses formal features of a text, namely sequences and parallelisms. Following the identification of these formal patterns, the meanings of a text are extracted from them. The fact that, for Jakobson, they are objective features of the text, also makes the text's meanings objective for him. From today's point of view, this objectivity of meaning can no longer be asserted. Nevertheless, stylistic analyses still focus on linguistic patterns in a text in order to interpret the text's meanings from them. This interpretation is a subjective process, however.

Jakobson's focus on sequences and parallelisms as defining features of literary texts seems to introduce an empirical component into the analysis of a text. He is remiss, though, in not defining the number of elements necessary for a sequence to be considered as such. This causes the paradox that he demands an objective scientific discipline, but leaves the decision as to what constitutes one of its defining features to every analyst's personal intuition and interpretation. This introduces a further subjective element into the analysis of the patterns.

Jakobson's emphasis on syntagmatic relationships in a text as objects of stylistic analyses means that the words and phrases the author really uses are analysed. This procedure stands in contrast to earlier traditional text analyses which frequently emphasized the paradigmatic axis of a text, that is, different possible ways of phrasing a content. But according to Jakobson, the meaning of a text is encoded by the language an author chooses and not by the language an author could have chosen. A text is the product of the author's decision. Consequently, 'the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis ofcombination' [1, p.358]. And Jakobson continues by saying that, equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence. In poetry one syllable is equalized with any other syllable of the same sequence; (. . .) in poetry the equation is used to build a sequence. [ibid]

Equivalences in the sense of parallel linguistic features or patterns are the basis of the syntagmatic organization of a literary text.

Today, structuralists still look at the syntagmatic axis of a text or corpus. The principle of equivalence has been broadened, though, to now encompass linguistic patterns in general. Identifying these patterns is the basis of a stylistic analysis. This means that an analysis is text-focused and that style is a textual phenomenon [2].

Jakobson has defined important parameters of linguistics by emphasizing the significance of the actual language of a text for an analysis as opposed to the potential language that could have been chosen for a text. He calls for a text intrinsic analysis which has the functions of language as its primary analytic objects. The target of an analysis is no longer the mere description of language, but the analysis of the functions of language, that is, of its effects on the receivers. The communicative function of language is now at the centre of linguistic research.

The emphasis on the text's poetic function in a stylistic analysis reflects the focus on communication in linguistic analyses in general. This specific focus, however, underlines that literary texts differ from other texts by their self-referentiality as they are characterized by a specific function, the poetic, which is relevant for every literary text and which can only be deduced from the text itself. Non-literary texts on the other hand can be characterized by all other textual functions.

The variety of analytic techniques in stylistics is, on the one hand, a strength of the discipline. On the other hand, it also shows that there is no consensus in linguistics as to where meaning is encoded in language. Cognitive linguists, namely, argue that cognitive processes have to be included in the analysis of meaning, while corpus linguists prefer a quantitative approach which can be tested by other linguists. There is no proof that either of the two theories is correct, only evidence for the growth of knowledge that is effected by them.

Bibliography:

1. Jakobson, R. (1958), 'Closing statement: linguistics and poetics', in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960, pp. 350-77.

2. Tolcsvai Nagy, G. (1998), 'Quantity and style from a cognitive point of view'. Journal ofQuantitative Linguistics, 5 (3), 232-9.