Jakobsonian (adj.)

Characteristic of, or a follower of, the linguistic principles of the American LINGUIST Roman Jakobson (1896–1983), a principal founder of the PRAGUE SCHOOL, and a major influence on contemporary linguistics. Two terms in particular are associated with his name, ‘Jakobsonian DISTINCTIVE FEATURE theory’ refers to the use he and other scholars made of the notion of distinctive feature in the mid-1950s, in which features are defined primarily in ACOUSTIC terms. In this dictionary, the main reference to this approach is cited as ‘Jakobson and Halle’ (i.e. R. Jakobson and M. Halle, Fundamentals of Language (1956)). In LANGUAGE ACQUISITION, the Jakobsonian hypothesis concerns the order in which he predicted OPPOSITIONS between sounds would appear (and also be lost, in cases of language breakdown).