Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the
Humanities
Humanities are academic disciplines that study aspects of human society and culture. In the Renaissance, the term contrasted with divinity and referred to what is now called classics, the main area of secular study in universities at the t ...
and, with
Daniel Dennett, co-director of the
Center for Cognitive Studies at
Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between
generative linguistics and
cognitive linguistics
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are con ...
, committed to both the existence of an innate
universal grammar (an important thesis of generative linguistics) and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and
cognition (the main purpose of cognitive linguistics).
Jackendoff's research deals with the
semantics
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comp ...
of
natural language, its bearing on the formal structure of
cognition, and its
lexical
Lexical may refer to:
Linguistics
* Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language
* Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification
* Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
* Lex ...
and syntactic expression. He has conducted extensive research on the relationship between conscious awareness and the
computational theory of mind
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of com ...
, on syntactic theory, and, with
Fred Lerdahl, on
musical cognition, culminating in their
generative theory of tonal music. His theory of
conceptual semantics
Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide ''an e ...
developed into a comprehensive theory on the foundations of language, which indeed is the title of a monograph (2002): ''Foundations of Language. Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution''. In his 1983 ''Semantics and Cognition'', he was one of the first linguists to integrate the visual faculty into his account of meaning and human language.
Jackendoff studied under linguists
Noam Chomsky and
Morris Halle
Morris Halle (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-born Jewish American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonolo ...
at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
, where he received his PhD in linguistics in 1969. Before moving to
Tufts in 2005, Jackendoff was professor of linguistics and chair of the linguistics program at
Brandeis University
, mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts"
, established =
, type = Private research university
, accreditation = NECHE
, president = Ronald D. Liebowitz
, ...
from 1971 to 2005. During the 2009 spring semester, he was an external professor at the
Santa Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, inclu ...
. Jackendoff was awarded the
Jean Nicod Prize
The Jean Nicod Prize is awarded annually in Paris to a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. The lectures are organized by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique as part of its effort to promote int ...
in 2003. He received the 2014
David E. Rumelhart Prize. He has also been granted honorary degrees by the Université du Québec à Montréal (2010), the National Music University of Bucharest (2011), the Music Academy of Cluj-Napoca (2011), the Ohio State University (2012), and Tel Aviv University (2013).
Interfaces and generative grammar
Jackendoff argues against a syntax-centered view of
generative grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguisti ...
(which he calls ''syntactocentrism''), at variance with earlier models such as the standard theory (1968), the extended standard theory (1972), the revised extended standard theory (1975), the
government and binding theory
A government is the system or group of people governing an organized community, generally a state.
In the case of its broad associative definition, government normally consists of legislature, executive, and judiciary. Government is a ...
(1981), and the
minimalist program (1993), in which syntax is the sole generative component in the language. Jackendoff takes syntax, semantics, and phonology all to be generative, interconnected via interface components. The task of his theory is to formalize the proper interface rules.
While rejecting mainstream generative grammar due to its syntactocentrism, the
cognitive semantics
Cognitive semantics is part of the cognitive linguistics movement. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. Cognitive semantics holds that language is part of a more general human cognitive ability, and can therefore only describe the world a ...
school has offered an insight that Jackendoff would sympathize with, namely, that meaning is a separate combinatorial system not entirely dependent upon syntax. Unlike many of the cognitive semantics approaches, he contends that neither syntax alone should determine semantics, nor vice versa. Syntax need only interface with semantics to the degree necessary to produce properly ordered phonological output (see Jackendoff 1996, 2002; Culicover & Jackendoff 2005).
Contribution to musical cognition
Jackendoff, together with
Fred Lerdahl, has been interested in the human capacity for music and its relationship to the human capacity for language. In particular, music has structure as well as a "grammar" (a means by which sounds are combined into structures). When a listener hears music in an
idiom he or she is familiar with, the music is not merely heard as a stream of sounds; rather, the listener constructs an unconscious understanding of the music and is able to understand pieces of music never heard previously. Jackendoff is interested in what cognitive structures or "
mental representations" this understanding consists of in the listener's mind, how a listener comes to acquire the musical grammar necessary to understand a particular musical idiom, what innate resources in the human mind make this acquisition possible and, finally, what parts of the human music capacity are governed by general cognitive functions and what parts result from specialized functions geared specifically for music (Jackendoff & Lerdahl, 1983; Lerdahl, 2001). Similar questions have also been raised regarding human language, although there are differences. For instance, it is more likely that humans evolved a specialized language
module than having evolved one for music, since even the specialized aspects of music comprehension are tied to more general cognitive functions.
Jackendoff, R.& Lerdahl, F. The capacity for music: what is it and what's special about it?, ''Cognition'',100, 33–72 (2006).
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Selected works
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See also
*Conceptual semantics
Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide ''an e ...
* Mentalist postulate
* List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates
* X-bar theory
References
External links
Website at Tufts University
Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University
Ray Jackendoff, Conceptual Semantics, Harvard University, 13 November 2007 (video)
''Semantics and Cognition''
in Shalom Lappin (1996), "The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory", 539–559. Oxford: Blackwell.
''Possible stages in the evolution of the language capacity''
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 7 (July 1999).
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jackendoff, Ray
1945 births
Living people
Linguists from the United States
Semanticists
Syntacticians
Brandeis University faculty
Tufts University faculty
Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Jean Nicod Prize laureates
Rumelhart Prize laureates
Santa Fe Institute people
Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society
Linguistic Society of America presidents
Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America