It may be of interest to readers of this blog that Y-H-B keeps receiving notifications from Academia regarding persons who have read my paper, “Roman Jakobson in Retrospect: Unvarnished Remembrances of a Stiff-Necked Student,” Chinese Semiotic Studies, 14 (2018), 41-56, available here under the rubric “PDFs of Papers by Michael Shapiro.” This paper recounts my experience with Jakobson as his student at Harvard and later as his opponent in a published dispute regarding Russian phonology, which includes a detailed discussion of Jakobson’s glaring errors.
I would hardly have expected this paper to have attracted so many readers. By contrast, I regard my most outstanding contribution (also available for reading here) to be “Sound and Meaning in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Language, 74 (1998), 81-103. Apropos, a recent survey conducted by the Linguistic Society of America shows that this item is among the 25 most-viewed/-downloaded articles in JSTOR covering volumes of Language from 1925 to 2000 (according to http://ideophone.org/language-anthology-citations/). It has also been downloaded over 200 times from this blog, which typically has ca. 30,000 visits/mo. (according to Webalizer) and over 200 subscribers (RSS feeds and e-mails).
MICHAEL SHAPIRO
I have read your most excellent paper, “Sound and Meaning in Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” twice, and your post today reminded me that I want to read it again.
Astounding, Gary!