Science Quote by Roman Jakobson

Jakobson’s line lands like a scalpel: speech isn’t a ghostly “meaning” floating above matter, it’s an engineered event with two hard surfaces. “Motor” points to the body as instrument - lungs pushing air, tongue shaping friction, lips closing and releasing. “Acoustic” flips the same act outward, into waves, resonance, and measurable signal. The intent is not poetic; it’s corrective. He’s fencing off a lazy mysticism about language and insisting that even the most rarefied linguistic theory starts with physiology and physics.

The subtext is a quiet polemic against approaches that treat language as either pure thought or pure text. By specifying “external, physical phenomena,” Jakobson brackets off semantics for a moment to secure a foundation: before words persuade, lie, or seduce, they are actions and artifacts. That framing also explains why structuralism could be so ambitious. If speech can be decomposed into articulatory and auditory parameters, it can be systematized, classified, compared across languages, and ultimately linked to cognition without collapsing into armchair introspection.

Context matters: Jakobson sits at the crossroads of early 20th-century linguistics, phonology, and the emerging technologies of sound (recording, telephony, later information theory). “Motor and acoustic” reads like a blueprint for modern speech science - the same duality that underwrites phonetics labs, speech pathology, and today’s voice assistants. It’s a reminder that language is not just what we mean; it’s what we can physically do, and what the world can physically carry.