Abstract: Although the critical methods and practices of Roman Jakobson's linguistic poetics made great achievements during the 1960s-1970s, Michael Riffaterre and Jonathan Culler, as representatives in the structuralist camp, successively introduced the criticisms of Jakobson, the former espousing the theory of "reader-response" and the latter that of the reader's "literary competence". Jakobson strives and keep fighting for research on "poetry of grammar" and "grammar of poetry", counter-criticizing from the perspectives of linguistics, reader expectation and competence development, the legitimacy of studies of linguistic structure, the dominance of poetic structure, and the objectivity of poetic analysis. The focus of the both sides' arguments is the function and sequence of reader interpretation and linguistic interpretation in the becoming of literary significance. In the post-structuralism times, reflections on this argument may help better understand the need for interdisciplinary research and the inevitability of the cultural turn in linguistic poetics.

Key words: Roman Jakobson, Riffaterre, Culle, linguistic poetics, literary significance, literary competence