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Quote :“Linguistics and Poetics” in Selected Writings vol. 3: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry
If “child” is the topic of the message, the speaker selects one among the extant, more or less similar, nouns like child, kid, youngster, tot, all of them equivalent in a certain respect, and then, to comment on this topic, he may select one of the semantically cognate verbs—sleeps, dozes, nods, naps. Both chosen words combine in the speech chain. The selection is produced on the base of equivalence, similarity and dissimilarity, synonymy and antonymy, while the combination, the build-up of the sequence, is based on contiguity. The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.
In this quote, Jakobson sums up the way in which a chain of speech is constructed. We may not always pay attention to the individual parts of a text or a sentence, but a writer often selects words from a bunch of terms that could also fit the bill: as Jakobson notes, we may choose the word “child,” but we could also pick the words “kid” or “youngster.”
A lot depends on the tone we want to put across and the context that we’re writing/speaking about, as well as our own context (for example, the word “youngster” is something you’d be more likely to hear from a 70-year-old than a 17-year-old). This goes for both nouns and verbs, and it’s through making such choices that sentences take shape.
When we’re putting together a sentence, we choose terms based on a whole load of factors. Jakobson gives us several examples: synonyms and antonyms, for example, refer to words that have either the same meaning as (synonymy), or the opposite meaning to (antonymy), a particular word—as you’ll know if you’ve ever used a thesaurus.
This has to do with not only selection, but also combination: we may start out by making selections, but it’s through the association of ideas and impressions that a sequence builds up.
Jakobson’s focus here is on poetic language, with one of his arguments being that the poetic function takes structural equivalence (which is associated with the process of selection) and transfers it into the process of combination. This may sound pretty complex, but, in short, it’s the difference between selecting words on the basis of their being equivalent and combining words on this basis. For Jakobson, the first approach is typical of ordinary language and the second marks out poetic language.
By summarizing the differences between ordinary and poetic language, Jakobson gives us an idea of how to approach texts through a structuralist lens. Studying literature in this way therefore allows us to engage with texts on a deeper level and to define, and compare, their various features. How poetic!