PARTISAN REVIEW
537
formidably complicated wntmg, and the complication tends to ob–
scure what I think is a fundamentally simplistic approach to literature.
Perhaps no living linguist has enjoyed a greater preeminence among
the structuralists than Roman Jakobson. Jakobson's principal state–
ment on poetic theory can be found in an essay "Linguistics and
Poetics." In this essay, Jakobson proposes his often quoted model for
a differentiation between poetic and other uses of language:
"The
poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of
selection onto the axis of combination."
For nonlinguists, this for–
mula obviously requires some explanation. What does Jakobson mean
by "equivalence," and what are the two "axes" he refers to?
Ferdinand de Saussure had suggested that every linguistic sign
implies two modes of arrangement. Let's consider the Saussurian dis–
tinction as it applies to individual words. The word "boy" in the
sentence "The boy is running down the street" could be studied by
a linguist from two points of view. On the one hand, it exists in a
linear, temporal sequence. It is part of a chain of words which occupy
a certain amount of space on a page, and which take a certain
amount of time to say. In linguistic terminology, all such sequences
belong to the syntagmatic pole of language; and depending on which
linguist you read, this placing of linguistic units one after the other
is also referred to as the axis of combination, or of contiguity, or of
concatenation. But - to return to my example - the word "boy"
doesn't exist
only
in relation to the other words of the sentence "The
boy is running down the street." It has other relations not actualized
in the given sentence. That is, the speaker of the sentence has chosen
the word "boy" from among several terms which, because of their
similarity or rough equivalence, might be substituted for " boy": for
example, "kid," "youngster," "child." Linguists have called these
relations the paradigmatic pole of language, or the axis of selection
or of substitution. In ordinary speech and writing, the two poles of
language usually don' t interfere with each other - at least not in a
striking or even noticeable way. No other word in "The boy is running
down the street" is synonymous or equivalent to "boy." Sentences
are not ordinarily sequences of synonymous words; nor are they se–
quences of similar grammatical constructions, or of identical sounds.
But, according to Jakobson, the axis of selection among equivalent
words or sounds occasionally does get projected onto the axis of com–
bination, and this, he argues, is what happens in poetry.
