Structuralist Poetics: Roman Jakobson's Metaphor and Metonymy

• His study of aphasia: two major kinds of disorder--'similarity disorder' and 'continguity disorder'
• He relates these two kinds to the two basic rhetoric figures: metaphor and metonymy.  Linguistic signs, for him, are formed through the two-fold process of "selection" and "combination."
  (Structuralism and Semiotics p. 78)
• Jacobson's methodology:
  1. discover the distributive pattern which link the stanzas of poems in a variety of combinations;
  2. shows that the central lines are a some way distinguished and set off from the rest.
  3. Example: "Spleen"

(external)Literary Criticism Databank: Structuralism and Semiotics