Two Aspects of Language

Roman Jackson, a Russian formalist and the 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 Two Aspects of Language
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. Jackobson also stresses the combination and
selection play in any 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.
Messages are constructed by a combination of a horizontal movement and vertical
movement. In the former, one conjoins words, and in the latter one selects the particular word
from a substitution set of similar items. 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 similarity and cannot see their distinction. His power of combination helps
him make sentences grammatically, but he makes mistakes with content words. 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.
Jackobson points 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. These are the metaphoric and metonymic processes that govern all verbal
activity and human behavior. Every case of aphasia involves an impairment of the metaphoric or
metonymic activities, and every case exhibits at least one of these traits. Metaphor and
metonymy are the defining poles of language: all linguistic expressions lie somewhere between
these extremes
Every form of aphasic disturbance consists either of the faculty for selection and
substitution or for combination and contexture. The former affliction involves a deterioration of

metalinguistic operations, while the latter damages the capacity for maintaining the hierarchy of
linguistic units.
The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one
topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The
metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way
for the second. In aphasia one or the other of these two processes is restricted. In normal verbal
behaviour both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under
the influence of a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is given to one of the
two processes over the other.
In a well-known psychological test, children were given some nouns and told to utter the
first verbal response that comes into their heads. In this experiment two opposite linguistic predilections are invariably exhibited: the response is intended either as a substitute for, or as' a
complement to, the stimulus. In the latter case the stimulus and the response together form a
proper syntactic construction, most usually a sentence. These two types of reaction have been
labelled substitutive and predicative. For example, to the stimulus hut one response was burnt
out; another is a poor little house. Both reactions are predicative. The first creates a purely
narrative context, while in the second there is a double' connection with the subject hut
In manipulating these two kinds of connection (similarity and contiguity) in both their
aspects (positional and semantic) - selecting, combining, and ranking them - an individual
exhibits his personal style, his verbal predilections and preferences. In verbal art the interaction
of these two elements is pronounced.
Rich material for the study of this relationship is to be found in verse patterns which
require a compulsory parallelism between adjacent lines as found in Biblical poetry. In Russian
lyrical songs, metaphoric constructions predominate, while in the heroic epics the metonymic
way is preponderant.
In poetry there are various motives which determine the choice between these alternates.
The primacy of the metaphoric process in the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism has
been repeatedly acknowledged. Following the path of contiguous relationships, the realist author
metonymically digresses from the plot to the atmosphere and from the characters to the setting in
space and time. He is fond of synecdochic (a part represents the whole or vice versa) details. In
the scene of Anna Karenina's suicide Tolstoys artistic attention is focused on the heroine's

handbag; and in War and Peace the synecdoches "hair on the upper lip" and "bare shoulders" are
used by the same writer to stand for the female characters to whom these feaures belong.
Hence poetry focuses on sign and form whereas prose concentrates on contiguity.