The Metaphor and Metonymic Poles by Roman Jakobson

Roman Jackson, first one of the leading members of Russian formalism and then a founder of the Prague School of Linguistics, stands as a link between formalism and structuralism. He is such a literary theorist whose approach is essentially that of a linguist.

His famous piece of essay “Thee Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances” is a seminal text in structural analysis as developed by Ferdinand de Saussure.

Saussure has a view that every speech is divided from the langue and that the process of choice of words has a two-fold character: Syntagma (combination) and Paradigma (selection). Syntagma comes in to play whenever we form a sentence whereas Paradigma applies at every stage that is any noun used in a sentence is actually, after we have selected it from the vast inventory of language.

Jackson, like Saussure realizes the fundamental role, which combination and selection play in language. The selection and combination do not occur consecutively, but intermingle at every point, and that they operate and cooperate at every level of speech. In other words, in Jakobson’s theory, every speech requires at every level, the interaction of both horizontal and vertical movements.

Messages are constructed by a combination of a horizontal movement, which conjoins words, and a vertical movement, which selects the particular word from a substitution set of similar items. We may therefore sum up Jakobson’s position in his own language as “speech implies a selection of certain linguistic entities and their combination in to linguistic units of a higher degree of complexity”.

Similarly, Jackson classifies two types of aphasia based on such a bipolar function of language- the similarity disorder and contiguity disorder. In the Similarity disorder the patient loses the capacity to select and substitute elements because he is confused with their similarly and cannot see their distinction. His power of combination helps him make grammatically sentences, but he makes mistakes with content words. He cannot recognize words without content. For him only combined sequences are meaningful. There is another type of aphasia in which a person may have a good vocabulary but fails to put words together properly. The defect in the production of speech due to the loss of the capacity to combine is called contiguity disorder.

Jackson goes on to point out that the two disorders correspond to the two figures of speech: metaphor and metonymy. Metaphor is alien to the similarity disorder and metonymy to the contiguity disorder.

It is by manipulating the two kinds of connections in their two aspects that an individual reveals his personal style, his taste and his verbal preference.

For Jackobson, since the opposition between metaphor and metonymy corresponds to the dichotomy between two axes of language, the distinction between those two figures of speech is the key to understanding all human discourse and all human behavior.