Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language.

[A General Rhetoric 1981]
Holenstein E. Jakobson was also well known for his critique of the emergence of sound in film. Poetry and Science 1983
Le Guern M.

As one of the first of the structural analysis of language which became the dominant trend of linguistics during the first half of the twentieth-century Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century. Roman Osipovich Jakobson (Russian: Рома́н О́сипович Якобсо́н) (October 10 1896 – July 18 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. Drawing on insights from Charles Sanders Peirce's semiotics as well as from communication theory and cybernetics he proposed methods for the investigation of poetry music the visual arts and cinema.