Ray Jackendoff
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Ray Jackendoff is an influential contemporary linguist who has always straddled the boundary between Generative linguistics and Cognitive linguistics, committed as he is both to the existence of an innate Universal Grammar (an all-important thesis of Generative Linguistics) and to giving an account of language that meshes well with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition (the main purpose of Cognitive Linguistics). Jackendoff's research deals with the semantics of natural language, its bearing on the formal structure of cognition, and its lexical and syntactic expression. He has also done extensive research on the relationship between conscious awareness and the computational theory of mind, on syntactic theory, and, with Fred Lerdahl, on musical cognition. His theory of Conceptual Semantics developed into a comprehensive theory on the foundations of language, which is indeed the title of his most recent monograph (2002): Foundations of Language. Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. Much earlier, in his 1983 Semantics and Cognition, he was one of the first linguists to integrate the vision faculty into his account of meaning and human language.
Jackendoff has been Professor of Linguistics and Chair of the Linguistics Program at Brandeis University from the early 1970s to 2005. Beginning in the fall of 2005, he will be in the Cognitive Science center at Tufts University in Somerville, MA.
Selected works
- Jackendoff, Ray (1983) Semantics and Cognition. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Jackendoff, Ray (1990) Semantic Structures. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
- Jackendoff, Ray (2002) Foundations of Language (Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution). Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
- Peter Culicover & Ray Jackendoff (2005) Simpler syntax. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.
See also
External link
- Personal website (http://people.brandeis.edu/~jackendo)