Science Quote by Roman Jakobson

Jakobson is quietly detonating the cozy assumption that words are just neutral containers for meaning. In “poetic language,” he argues, the sign stops behaving like a transparent window and starts acting like an object with its own gravity. The phrase “autonomous value” is the tell: sound, rhythm, and pattern aren’t decorative frosting on the “real” message. They become part of the message’s machinery, exerting force alongside semantics rather than trailing behind it.

The intent is scientific, but the move is cultural: Jakobson is staking a structuralist claim that poetry is not merely heightened speech, it’s a different operating mode. When he says sound symbolism “becomes an actual factor,” he’s pushing back against the everyday view that sound-meaning connections are accidental. In poetic contexts, those connections are engineered. Alliteration, assonance, meter, phonetic echo: these aren’t ornaments, they’re causal agents shaping how meaning lands in the body, how it sticks in memory, how it feels inevitable.

“Accompaniment” carries subtext of music, and that’s strategic. It suggests a second channel running in parallel to the signified: a sonic score that can reinforce, complicate, or even sabotage denotation. A harsh cluster of consonants can make tenderness sound suspect; a lilting cadence can make a brutal idea glide down more easily.

Contextually, this sits inside Jakobson’s broader project (and the era’s): treating literature as analyzable form, not mystical inspiration. The provocation is that poetry’s “meaning” is partly audible engineering - and that ignoring it is missing the point by design.