Roman Jakobson |
"Meta language as linguistic problem." |
| in Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, VII, p. 113-121. Edited by S. Rudy, S. Rudy. The Hague: Mouton1985 [1956]. |
(another version of this paper is included in the first part of Jakobson paper on linguistics and poetry (1960)
Far from being confined to the sphere of science, metalingual operations prove to be an integral part of our verbal activities. Whenever the addresser and/or the addressee need to check up whether they use the same code, speech is focused upon the CODE and thus performs a METALINGUAL (or glossing function) ... "Do you know what I mean?" Then, by replacing the questionable sign with another sign or a whole group of signs fromt he same or another linguistic code, the encoder of the message seeks to make it more accessible to the decoder. ... C.S. Pierce's thesis that any sign translates itself into other signs in which it is more fully developed ...Signs are viewed by Pierce as equivalent "when either might have been an interpretant of the other." (p. 117-118)