Raulelgreco · CC BY-SA 4.0

Roman Jakobson co-founded modern phonology, developing with Nikolai Trubetzkoy the techniques still used to analyze how languages organize sound, then extended the same structural approach to syntax, poetry and semiotics. His ideas carried structuralism out of linguistics and into anthropology and literary theory through his influence on Claude Lévi-Strauss and Roland Barthes, making him one of the most widely cited linguists of the twentieth century.