Science Quote by Roman Jakobson

Jakobson is quietly dismantling the folk fantasy that speech is a neat queue of sounds, each taking its turn like well-behaved commuters. His point is technical, but the provocation is cultural: language only looks linear because writing trains us to see it that way. In the mouth and ear, speech is a layered event. The “after” can begin “before” because articulation is not a series of isolated clicks; it’s coordinated motion, with gestures that smear across time. That overlap is what later phonetics and phonology would call coarticulation, but Jakobson’s phrasing does more than name a mechanism. It reorients what counts as the basic unit of analysis.

The subtext is methodological. If sounds interpenetrate, you can’t build a science of language by treating phonemes as tiny beads on a string. You need a model that explains how contrast survives messiness: how listeners reliably hear distinctions even when the physical signal is blended. This is Jakobson the structuralist-scientist arguing that the mind’s organization of differences matters at least as much as the raw acoustics.

Contextually, the line sits in a 20th-century pivot away from atomizing speech into segments and toward systems, features, and perception. It also gestures at a broader modernist suspicion of simple sequences: time is not always “one thing after another,” and meaning often arrives as an overlap of cues. Jakobson makes that suspicion measurable, turning it into an argument about how humans actually process language in real time.