Roman Osipovich Jakobson ia a scholar of Russian origin. He was one of the founding members of the Prague Linguistics Circle. Jakobson’s intellectual interests are broad and reflect those of the Prague School as a whole; he has written a great deal, for instance, on the structural approach to literature.
The essence of Jakobson’s approach to phonology is the notion that there is a relatively simple, orderly, universal “psychological system” of sounds underlying the chaotic wealth of different kinds of sound observed by the phonetician.
Speech-sounds may be characterized in terms of distinct and independent or quasi-independent parameters, as we shall call them. Thus the height within the oral cavity of the highest point of the tongue is one articulatory parameter and the position of this point on the front/back scale is another parameter. These two parameters represent choices which are to some extent independent of one another, but not wholly so: the more “open” a vowel is- that is, the more the tongue is depressed into a flat mass in the bottom of the mouth- the less meaningful it is to speak of a particular “highest point” and hence the less difference there is between front and back vowels. Position of the soft palate is a third articulatory parameter, this is more independent of the former parameters than they are of each other: any vowel can be “nasal” or “oral”, though the independence is not absolute- there is a tendency, because of the way in which the workings of the relevant muscles interact, for nasal vowels to be relatively open rather than relative close.
One of the lessons of articulatory phonetics is that human vocal anatomy provides a very large range of different phonetic parameters – far more, probably, than any individual language uses distinctively.
