Roman Jakobson

Linguists are concerned with language in all of its aspects -
language in operation, language in drift, language in its nascent
state, and finally language in dissolution. As the developments of the
last decades prove, aphasia is an extremely productive field for lin-
guistic study; furthermore, the cooperation of linguists, psychologists,
psychiatrists, neurologists and other experts is of ever increasing value
here.

The first real interpreter of aphasia, Hughlings Jackson, recog-
nized that an aphasic mutation may be regarded as twofold in nature:
when a patient says 'chair' for 'table', he shows, first, a deficit in
not saying 'table' and, second, a compensation in saying 'chair' in-
stead ( 5 ). For the study of expressive language this approach is parti-
cularly illuminating: aphasia can lead to a redistribution of linguistic
functions. This may be illustrated in the following examples.

In Norwegian, stressed syllables carry two different intonations
which, other things being equal, serve to distinguish words; this dis-
tinctive function limits the use of intonation for expressive purposes.
In standard German, intonation does not differentiate words but is often
used to signal the emotional attitude of the speaker. A Norwegian
woman, whom Monrad-Krohn ( 11 ) examined, had been struck by a
bomb-fragment and had lost her ability to distinguish the two word-
differentiating intonations of her mother tongue. Consequently her
use of intonation was fully released for expressive variation, and as a
result she was mistaken by her countrymen for a Norwegian-speaking
German and often met their animosity in Nazi -occupied Oslo.

In the next illustration the loss of a distinctive feature in aphasia
is compensated for by an additional expressive feature. In Czech the

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