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Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution
Already hailed as a masterpiece, Foundations of Language offers a brilliant overhaul of the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields. "Few books really deserve the cliché 'this should be read by every researcher in the field,'" writes Steven Pinker,
author of The Language Instinct , "But Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does."
Foundations of Language offers a radically new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the promise of early generative that language can be a valuable entree into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is remarkably
interdisciplinary. Behind its innovations is Jackendoff's fundamental proposal that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. this shift in basic architecture makes possible a radical reconception of mental grammar and how it is
learned. As a consequence, Jackendoff is able to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception,
the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, Jackendoff offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic
and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics.
Here then is the most fundamental contribution to linguistic theory in over three decades.
author of The Language Instinct , "But Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does."
Foundations of Language offers a radically new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the promise of early generative that language can be a valuable entree into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is remarkably
interdisciplinary. Behind its innovations is Jackendoff's fundamental proposal that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. this shift in basic architecture makes possible a radical reconception of mental grammar and how it is
learned. As a consequence, Jackendoff is able to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception,
the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, Jackendoff offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic
and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics.
Here then is the most fundamental contribution to linguistic theory in over three decades.
498 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2002
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961 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
October 13, 2011
clearly ahead of himself, jackendoff uses English primarily in example of his thesis (which is actually a thesis made of multiples, when morphology is explored it has so many alternates that it seems almost an entire argument against himself). he rarely uses spoken languages (languages that never used written form), rarely uses diversions from English's structuring (Turkish is used infrequently), rarely uses 'dead' languages, never uses pictogram-languages (Chinese) and never glyphic (Maya). while he successfully challenges the Lakoff/Johnson proposal regarding metaphor, he subsumes his book in fragments and directions flowing through morphology, semantics, syntax, evolving Chomsky while trying to posit a neural connection between 'grammar' and phoneme, yet he never makes a successful return to spatial, he never tries to explore how speech is not merely spatial in what it 'describes' but that it must be first and foremost a spatial mirror of what the brain's inner sees in the outer. spoken language is window dressing for more complete memories that are stored in spatial parameters (but not using a visual picture). Spatial remains the book's visible failure, relegated to a bottom of the book's first and elemental figure (1.1). A colossal ascent and a very fast drop into the abyss of knowledge. Jackendoff's unmentioned pre-introductory reasoning seems to be, we use these spoken/written tools, they must form a collective lens into brain structure. Perversely he uses a western ideogram, an image of a very linear metaphor, a tree, and a five-pointed star to illustrate his poorly developed neural argument. The spectre of Sapir-Whorff haunts this book, it's a ghost Jackendoof can't shake no matter how many Generatives he dispels. Be wary of linguists offering lenses into the brain.
January 7, 2019
a great book to have on my shelves
November 28, 2025
Jackendoff’s ‘Foundations of Language’ enters the scholarly conversation with the ambiance of a hacker rewriting the source code of generative grammar while everyone else is still busy arguing about the UI theme. The book feels like the intellectual equivalent of walking into a conference where people are passionately debating whether a single module defines linguistic competence—and Jackendoff casually plugs a USB drive into the main system and says, “Actually, I’ve rewritten the architecture so everything talks to everything.”
It’s bold. It’s cerebral. It’s occasionally unintentionally snarky through sheer clarity. And most importantly, it’s deeply, unapologetically ambitious.
Where Steven Pinker simplifies for narrative elegance and where Noam Chomsky abstracts for philosophical purity, Jackendoff negotiates—between models, domains, methodologies, and disciplines.
He seems less interested in claiming theoretical territory and more interested in mapping the actual terrain of language as a phenomenon that must be lived in the brain, expressed in sound, acquired in childhood, processed in milliseconds, shared in culture, and formalised in rules.
He wants a theory of language that feels like a realistic blueprint — something that can be built upon — rather than a metaphysical decree handed down from theoretical Olympus.
So he does something audacious: he starts dismantling the syntax-centred empire upon which much of modern linguistic theory rests and replaces it with a multi-level architecture in which phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics each hold independent yet highly interactive roles. It’s modularity, yes — but not the cold structural modularity of early systems theory. This is modularity with personality. Modularity with context. Modularity with vibes.
There’s a postmodern flavour to his approach, not in the sense of obscurity or relativistic vagueness, but in the refusal to accept singular narratives. Language, in Jackendoff’s framework, is not a single river flowing from universal grammar into surface structure.
Instead, it is four parallel cognitive streams — sound, structure, meaning, and conceptual interface — flowing alongside one another, sometimes merging, sometimes diverging, always negotiating.
Meaning is not the final station but one node in a network. Structure is not a rigid universal template but a set of organising principles that guide pattern formation and interpretation. And somewhere in this multidimensional system — which feels part computational model, part cognitive mapping exercise — sits the human mind: messy, resourceful, improvisational, and astonishingly efficient.
One of the most striking qualities of Jackendoff’s writing is how intense yet surprisingly accessible it remains. He guides the reader through conceptual structures, semantic primitives, correspondence rules, and the architecture of the lexicon with the tone of an expert who genuinely wants to bring you along rather than intimidate or overwhelm.
At times the book reads almost like a backstage tour of a massive theatre production where every subsystem — lighting, costume, acting, stage mechanics, choreography, audience expectation — is revealed not as ornament but as essential machinery.
As you progress, you start seeing language less as a stack of rules and more as choreography: sound, meaning, syntax, and culture dancing, colliding, adapting, negotiating, and occasionally improvising in real-time. Language becomes not an object but a performance sustained by cognition.
And perhaps the most refreshing intellectual feature of the book is that Jackendoff ‘embraces’ complexity. In a scholarly world where theories often compete to be the most elegant reduction or the simplest universal, he refuses the temptation to flatten. He acknowledges disorder. He acknowledges uncertainty. He acknowledges that minds and languages evolved not to satisfy theoretical neatness but to solve communicative, cognitive, and social problems.
He does not promise a universal theory that collapses all variation into a single explanatory mechanism. Instead, he gives you frameworks sturdy enough to hold the mess — and the honesty to admit that the mess is real.
Reading ‘Foundations of Language’ in 2025 feels especially relevant, almost uncannily prescient. Many frameworks Jackendoff proposed—once considered provocative or unnecessarily pluralistic—now sit comfortably alongside modern developments in neurolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computational modelling, and even AI language architecture. His framework was not merely theoretical—it anticipated the interdisciplinary turn that would later define 21st-century linguistic science.
Where older models tended to build walls between phonology and syntax, competence and performance, and grammar and cognition, Jackendoff seeks connective tissue. If Bloomfield built the methodological walls of structural linguistics and Chomsky built the towering theoretical constructs of generative grammar, then Jackendoff built the traffic system between them—the intellectual highway system where models can cross-validate and communicate rather than remain isolated paradigms.
And the remarkable thing? The system actually works. The architectural metaphor holds. The book becomes not just another theoretical argument but a manifesto for interdisciplinarity — a reminder that language is too complex, too distributed across cognition and culture, to be owned by any one subfield or ideology.
Jackendoff is at his strongest when discussing the lexicon, where he challenges the assumption that lexical items are simply static entries waiting to be slotted into syntactic frames. Instead, he argues the lexicon is a structured system of correspondences—a cognitive hub where phonological, syntactic, morphological, semantic, and conceptual information converge. In this sense, the lexicon becomes the beating heart of linguistic representation rather than a peripheral component.
This shift carries enormous implications: it suggests that grammar is not merely a computational system generating infinite expressions from finite rules but a vast relational mapping space—one that evolves with use, context, and acquisition. Language becomes a cognitive ecosystem rather than a machine.
And here is where the book becomes revolutionary: it restores the role of semantics and conceptual structures from their generative exile.
For decades, mainstream linguistic theory treated meaning as peripheral or, worse, as too “slippery” to model. Jackendoff argues the opposite: that any theory ignoring meaning—or relegating it to unstated competence—fails to explain what language ‘is for.’ Thought without expression might exist, but language without meaning is merely algebra.
He pushes further: cognition and linguistic form are deeply entangled. Syntax doesn’t simply generate meaning—meaning pushes back on structure. Acquisition does not merely internalize rules—it maps patterns onto conceptual categories. Communication isn’t merely encoding and decoding—it’s a negotiation of shared cognitive structures.
This is where Jackendoff aligns subtly with construction grammar, usage-based theories, and emergentist models, even though he never fully abandons the generative framework. He becomes a bridge thinker—someone who refuses the binary of competence vs. performance, innate vs. emergent, and structure vs. meaning.
By the time you reach the final chapters, a quiet transformation happens: the book that began as a critique of generative fundamentalism ends as a conceptual redesign of linguistic theory itself—one more hospitable, more flexible, and more cognitively plausible.
And what lingers after the last page is not merely admiration for the theory but appreciation for the intellectual temperament behind it. Jackendoff does not write like someone trying to win. He writes like someone trying to understand—someone willing to test boundaries, invite alternatives, and allow paradox to exist while evidence continues to accumulate.
There is humility woven into the architecture—a humility rare in theoretical fields driven by paradigm dominance. ‘Foundations of Language’ becomes foundational not because it declares itself definitive, but because it leaves the structure open for future frameworks, data, and methodologies to plug in. It is a work built not as a monument, but as infrastructure.
That openness — that scholarly generosity — is what ultimately makes the book quietly revolutionary. It feels less like a closing statement in the history of linguistic theory and more like a beginning: a map of where linguistic science ‘could’ go once it stops defending borders and begins building connections.
Jackendoff’s contribution is not merely theoretical; it is architectural, cognitive, interdisciplinary, and deeply human. It reminds us that language is not just a rule system, not just a neurological behaviour, not just a cognitive adaptation, not just a semiotic tool — but all of these at once.
And in recognising that multiplicity — and designing a framework capable of holding it — ‘Foundations of Language’ becomes exactly what its title promises: a foundation. Not final, not universal, but necessary. The kind of work that will still be cited, debated, borrowed from, and built upon decades after theories around it fade.
A quiet revolution, delivered with clarity, rigour, and curiosity — and possibly one of the most important linguistic works of its era.
A classic tome for all-time. Highly recommended.
It’s bold. It’s cerebral. It’s occasionally unintentionally snarky through sheer clarity. And most importantly, it’s deeply, unapologetically ambitious.
Where Steven Pinker simplifies for narrative elegance and where Noam Chomsky abstracts for philosophical purity, Jackendoff negotiates—between models, domains, methodologies, and disciplines.
He seems less interested in claiming theoretical territory and more interested in mapping the actual terrain of language as a phenomenon that must be lived in the brain, expressed in sound, acquired in childhood, processed in milliseconds, shared in culture, and formalised in rules.
He wants a theory of language that feels like a realistic blueprint — something that can be built upon — rather than a metaphysical decree handed down from theoretical Olympus.
So he does something audacious: he starts dismantling the syntax-centred empire upon which much of modern linguistic theory rests and replaces it with a multi-level architecture in which phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics each hold independent yet highly interactive roles. It’s modularity, yes — but not the cold structural modularity of early systems theory. This is modularity with personality. Modularity with context. Modularity with vibes.
There’s a postmodern flavour to his approach, not in the sense of obscurity or relativistic vagueness, but in the refusal to accept singular narratives. Language, in Jackendoff’s framework, is not a single river flowing from universal grammar into surface structure.
Instead, it is four parallel cognitive streams — sound, structure, meaning, and conceptual interface — flowing alongside one another, sometimes merging, sometimes diverging, always negotiating.
Meaning is not the final station but one node in a network. Structure is not a rigid universal template but a set of organising principles that guide pattern formation and interpretation. And somewhere in this multidimensional system — which feels part computational model, part cognitive mapping exercise — sits the human mind: messy, resourceful, improvisational, and astonishingly efficient.
One of the most striking qualities of Jackendoff’s writing is how intense yet surprisingly accessible it remains. He guides the reader through conceptual structures, semantic primitives, correspondence rules, and the architecture of the lexicon with the tone of an expert who genuinely wants to bring you along rather than intimidate or overwhelm.
At times the book reads almost like a backstage tour of a massive theatre production where every subsystem — lighting, costume, acting, stage mechanics, choreography, audience expectation — is revealed not as ornament but as essential machinery.
As you progress, you start seeing language less as a stack of rules and more as choreography: sound, meaning, syntax, and culture dancing, colliding, adapting, negotiating, and occasionally improvising in real-time. Language becomes not an object but a performance sustained by cognition.
And perhaps the most refreshing intellectual feature of the book is that Jackendoff ‘embraces’ complexity. In a scholarly world where theories often compete to be the most elegant reduction or the simplest universal, he refuses the temptation to flatten. He acknowledges disorder. He acknowledges uncertainty. He acknowledges that minds and languages evolved not to satisfy theoretical neatness but to solve communicative, cognitive, and social problems.
He does not promise a universal theory that collapses all variation into a single explanatory mechanism. Instead, he gives you frameworks sturdy enough to hold the mess — and the honesty to admit that the mess is real.
Reading ‘Foundations of Language’ in 2025 feels especially relevant, almost uncannily prescient. Many frameworks Jackendoff proposed—once considered provocative or unnecessarily pluralistic—now sit comfortably alongside modern developments in neurolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, computational modelling, and even AI language architecture. His framework was not merely theoretical—it anticipated the interdisciplinary turn that would later define 21st-century linguistic science.
Where older models tended to build walls between phonology and syntax, competence and performance, and grammar and cognition, Jackendoff seeks connective tissue. If Bloomfield built the methodological walls of structural linguistics and Chomsky built the towering theoretical constructs of generative grammar, then Jackendoff built the traffic system between them—the intellectual highway system where models can cross-validate and communicate rather than remain isolated paradigms.
And the remarkable thing? The system actually works. The architectural metaphor holds. The book becomes not just another theoretical argument but a manifesto for interdisciplinarity — a reminder that language is too complex, too distributed across cognition and culture, to be owned by any one subfield or ideology.
Jackendoff is at his strongest when discussing the lexicon, where he challenges the assumption that lexical items are simply static entries waiting to be slotted into syntactic frames. Instead, he argues the lexicon is a structured system of correspondences—a cognitive hub where phonological, syntactic, morphological, semantic, and conceptual information converge. In this sense, the lexicon becomes the beating heart of linguistic representation rather than a peripheral component.
This shift carries enormous implications: it suggests that grammar is not merely a computational system generating infinite expressions from finite rules but a vast relational mapping space—one that evolves with use, context, and acquisition. Language becomes a cognitive ecosystem rather than a machine.
And here is where the book becomes revolutionary: it restores the role of semantics and conceptual structures from their generative exile.
For decades, mainstream linguistic theory treated meaning as peripheral or, worse, as too “slippery” to model. Jackendoff argues the opposite: that any theory ignoring meaning—or relegating it to unstated competence—fails to explain what language ‘is for.’ Thought without expression might exist, but language without meaning is merely algebra.
He pushes further: cognition and linguistic form are deeply entangled. Syntax doesn’t simply generate meaning—meaning pushes back on structure. Acquisition does not merely internalize rules—it maps patterns onto conceptual categories. Communication isn’t merely encoding and decoding—it’s a negotiation of shared cognitive structures.
This is where Jackendoff aligns subtly with construction grammar, usage-based theories, and emergentist models, even though he never fully abandons the generative framework. He becomes a bridge thinker—someone who refuses the binary of competence vs. performance, innate vs. emergent, and structure vs. meaning.
By the time you reach the final chapters, a quiet transformation happens: the book that began as a critique of generative fundamentalism ends as a conceptual redesign of linguistic theory itself—one more hospitable, more flexible, and more cognitively plausible.
And what lingers after the last page is not merely admiration for the theory but appreciation for the intellectual temperament behind it. Jackendoff does not write like someone trying to win. He writes like someone trying to understand—someone willing to test boundaries, invite alternatives, and allow paradox to exist while evidence continues to accumulate.
There is humility woven into the architecture—a humility rare in theoretical fields driven by paradigm dominance. ‘Foundations of Language’ becomes foundational not because it declares itself definitive, but because it leaves the structure open for future frameworks, data, and methodologies to plug in. It is a work built not as a monument, but as infrastructure.
That openness — that scholarly generosity — is what ultimately makes the book quietly revolutionary. It feels less like a closing statement in the history of linguistic theory and more like a beginning: a map of where linguistic science ‘could’ go once it stops defending borders and begins building connections.
Jackendoff’s contribution is not merely theoretical; it is architectural, cognitive, interdisciplinary, and deeply human. It reminds us that language is not just a rule system, not just a neurological behaviour, not just a cognitive adaptation, not just a semiotic tool — but all of these at once.
And in recognising that multiplicity — and designing a framework capable of holding it — ‘Foundations of Language’ becomes exactly what its title promises: a foundation. Not final, not universal, but necessary. The kind of work that will still be cited, debated, borrowed from, and built upon decades after theories around it fade.
A quiet revolution, delivered with clarity, rigour, and curiosity — and possibly one of the most important linguistic works of its era.
A classic tome for all-time. Highly recommended.
October 29, 2019
The four star rating reflects the fact that large swathes of this book were too bound up within the complex world of linguistics for me to understand them. I'm inclined to think I would appreciate them if I had more familiarity with the field, but I did have some concerns about Jackendoff presupposing too much about what we can say the structures of the brain consist of. Very low certainty on that judgment though. The parts I did understand, which emerged at random in most chapters but came to a head in the chapters on evolutionary development, foundations of mentalistic semantics, and truth and reference, were brilliant. By far the most complex and nuanced account of the development of language and how to think of its relationship to thought I have encountered. It seems to fit in well with and expand on the theories of language suggested by the works of Dennett/Carruthers I really enjoyed. The mentalist theories of truth/reference strike me as right on track, especially with the more Kantian/PP frameworks I've felt more inclined to recently. That being said, my actual knowledge of this field still feels very limited, so I definitely need to read the criticisms of this work and alternative views more. I guess the other big question this book leaves me with is where research should be directed from here? Is the most meaningful hope for progress just better brain-imaging technology, or is there more room for theoretical/experimental insight? I'm not sure. The questions this book touches on feel so important to understanding the nature of human though, creativity, and what it would take to build AI, but this book also made me realize the amount of technical work and slogging through detail necessary to realize those aspirations, so I'm unsure how much deeper I want to go in these areas. Anyway, hard going in many parts but the peaks made it well worth it. Maybe I will look into the more popular-oriented book he wrote a few years ago.
September 25, 2021
I wish I read this book before beginning my undergraduate degree; despite its publication date (2002), Jackendoff's arguments have lost no force. He succeeds with elegance in making an excellent case for consilience among competing frameworks and disciplines by offering a parallel architecture -- one that rightly ascribes a non-negotiable status to mentalist theorising and maintains a very loyal commitment to empirical detail through and through.
In fact, I shot him an email, asking if he is still open to accepting new mentees, but the man seems to have retired. Yet, this richly cited work should be a brilliant starting point for anyone who wishes to advance a naturalistic take on language, and do so without giving up on the generative grammar project.
I know, so far, it's just uncritical acclaim. Jackendoff's case is, after all, not faultless; but, I want to take a break and explore a little more before writing a more informed and critical review here...
In fact, I shot him an email, asking if he is still open to accepting new mentees, but the man seems to have retired. Yet, this richly cited work should be a brilliant starting point for anyone who wishes to advance a naturalistic take on language, and do so without giving up on the generative grammar project.
I know, so far, it's just uncritical acclaim. Jackendoff's case is, after all, not faultless; but, I want to take a break and explore a little more before writing a more informed and critical review here...
August 23, 2021
Fascinating! A little beyond me in some places. Maybe not a beach read...
Want to read
April 6, 2023to-read
November 12, 2009
Jackendoff has created a provocative masterpiece in this exploration of the theories and current problems in cognitive and neurological grammar and its insight into the nature of language and thought. His survey of the linguistic theoretical landscape is thorough and nuanced and he adds his own cogent hypotheses when he finds the philosophical framework lacking. His approach to the problems of assigning truth-value to linguistic utterances as proposed by Gottlob Frege in On Sense and Reference and the locus of idiomatic grammar rules in the mind are particularly interesting.
Frege's model of determining the veracity of statements made with language has the advantage of being philosophically rigorous and appealing to a first-order level of intuition. However, because it insists that linguistic structures in the mind (that subsequently become communicated outward through speech and the written word) refer inherently to a state of affairs "in the world," his theory cannot articulate nor determine the veracity of statements about possibility or about imaginary events. To ascertain whether the phrase "it might rain today" is true, or what its being true even means is outside the power of his theory. Likewise, weighing the veracity of the statement, "Luke is the son of Darth Vader," is equally ambiguous. Jackendoff proposes that linguistic constructions "refer" not to a state of affairs in the world around us, but to a perceptual instantiation inside our own mind. This percept, as he calls it, can be the result of physical stimuli upon our nervous system, an extrapolation of that stimuli (as when we "see" something in the shadows), or generated within mind itself as through conscious imagining or nocturnal dreaming. What it means for a linguistic utterance to be true, now being decoupled from its conflation with reference, can be readdressed with fresh philosophical arguments. Jackendoff suggests that language is useful if it allows for two parties to share their notions of their own internal percepts in such a way as to cooperate together in a mutually beneficial fashion. Whether their percepts are identical or not is irrelevant for that task.
Jackendoff is a proponent of the Chomskyan-generated theoretical structure that suggests there exists within the human brain a neurologically hardwired grammar repository; that there is an innate ability to understand, recognize, and work within the set of syntactic relationships among words found in natural human languages. Chomsky desired to make all such relationships hardwired or derived from prior syntactic rules by hardwired derivation processes. The problem with this approach is that the logical contortions needed to arrive at certain idiomatic constructions defy our intuitions about grammar and language and our experience in learning those constructions. Jackendoff seeks to remedy this inelegancy by suggesting that the regular, common features of grammar are indeed hardwired into our brains, but that the exceptions and idiomatic constructions that are found throughout natural languages are not subtle logical derivations from the baseline syntactic regularity; rather, each lexical item needing unique syntactic consideration has such considerations "attached" to the item itself, that such considerations must be explicitly learned when first encountering the lexical item, and that such considerations override the baseline grammatical rules. This "plug and play" theory of syntax allows for arbitrarily complex statements to be uttered and understood without recourse to a massively (perhaps infinitely) complex instantiation of grammatical hardware in the brain.
Frege's model of determining the veracity of statements made with language has the advantage of being philosophically rigorous and appealing to a first-order level of intuition. However, because it insists that linguistic structures in the mind (that subsequently become communicated outward through speech and the written word) refer inherently to a state of affairs "in the world," his theory cannot articulate nor determine the veracity of statements about possibility or about imaginary events. To ascertain whether the phrase "it might rain today" is true, or what its being true even means is outside the power of his theory. Likewise, weighing the veracity of the statement, "Luke is the son of Darth Vader," is equally ambiguous. Jackendoff proposes that linguistic constructions "refer" not to a state of affairs in the world around us, but to a perceptual instantiation inside our own mind. This percept, as he calls it, can be the result of physical stimuli upon our nervous system, an extrapolation of that stimuli (as when we "see" something in the shadows), or generated within mind itself as through conscious imagining or nocturnal dreaming. What it means for a linguistic utterance to be true, now being decoupled from its conflation with reference, can be readdressed with fresh philosophical arguments. Jackendoff suggests that language is useful if it allows for two parties to share their notions of their own internal percepts in such a way as to cooperate together in a mutually beneficial fashion. Whether their percepts are identical or not is irrelevant for that task.
Jackendoff is a proponent of the Chomskyan-generated theoretical structure that suggests there exists within the human brain a neurologically hardwired grammar repository; that there is an innate ability to understand, recognize, and work within the set of syntactic relationships among words found in natural human languages. Chomsky desired to make all such relationships hardwired or derived from prior syntactic rules by hardwired derivation processes. The problem with this approach is that the logical contortions needed to arrive at certain idiomatic constructions defy our intuitions about grammar and language and our experience in learning those constructions. Jackendoff seeks to remedy this inelegancy by suggesting that the regular, common features of grammar are indeed hardwired into our brains, but that the exceptions and idiomatic constructions that are found throughout natural languages are not subtle logical derivations from the baseline syntactic regularity; rather, each lexical item needing unique syntactic consideration has such considerations "attached" to the item itself, that such considerations must be explicitly learned when first encountering the lexical item, and that such considerations override the baseline grammatical rules. This "plug and play" theory of syntax allows for arbitrarily complex statements to be uttered and understood without recourse to a massively (perhaps infinitely) complex instantiation of grammatical hardware in the brain.
June 30, 2012
Jackendoff is a distinguished linguist, and he is qualified to give a general overview of linguistics as few people are. Language is a specialized mental ability, like binocular vision or walking. It is specific to the human species - but many mammals have such specific abilities: the nose-touch sense of the star-nosed mole, the electric sense of the platypus, the echolocation of microbats and toothed whales. Like learning to walk, teething and puberty, learning a native language occurs at a specific age. Someone exposed to a language from birth learns it, on average, better than someone exposed to it at age 6; at age 12 it is worse still; at age 18 still. After age 18 the ability to learn a new language levels off, and becomes a kind of generic cognitive ability, like the ability to play chess or to acquire a professional skill. Universal grammar is another name for this ability to acquire a native language in childhood.
Jackendoff believes that generative grammar is too "syntactocentric" to describe language properly. He gives diagrams for five of Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories developed from 1968 to 1993; they are becoming ever more ornate. Instead, he thinks that phonology, syntax and semantics are all equally important generative systems, and the lexicon, stored in long-term memory, serves as the interface between each pair. What is actually stored in memory aren't words but some sort of combination of roots and morphological rules: a highly inflected language like Turkish can have as many as 10,000 possible words for each word in a poorly inflected language like English; surely, a native speaker of Turkish does not memorize 10,000 times as much as a native speaker of English. Syntax cannot be the only important component of language because a large percentage of utterances stand outside of syntax: things like "Yes", "Hello", "Ouch"; things like "tra-la-la" and "rickety-tickety-tin" have no semantic content either; I wonder where "blah blah blah" and "la dee da" belong.
One interesting chapter in Jackendoff's book is about a possible evolutionary history of language. He thinks that a language without syntax is of course not as expressive as true language but more so than no language at all. There has been a study of the speech of migrant workers who have not had formal instruction in the language of their host countries. It has stripped-down syntax and morphology, the word order is Agent First, Focus Last, and modifiers are adjacent to the word being modified. It is possible that the same was true of "protolanguage". Jackendoff also thinks that English noun compounds like "snowman", "wheelchair" and "garbageman", or even "failed password security question answer attempts limit", are a relic of an earlier stage of the language. The listener knows that a snowman is a sculpture of a man made of snow, a wheelchair is a chair with wheels instead of legs, and a garbageman is a man responsible for hauling away garbage; he does not need syntax to figure it out. I wonder how this squares with Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, where noun compounding is a major part of syntax, and unlike English, the head noun comes first (for example, in Modern Hebrew, "the holiday candlelight" is "or nerot ha-chag", "light-of candles-of the-holiday").
Jackendoff believes that generative grammar is too "syntactocentric" to describe language properly. He gives diagrams for five of Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories developed from 1968 to 1993; they are becoming ever more ornate. Instead, he thinks that phonology, syntax and semantics are all equally important generative systems, and the lexicon, stored in long-term memory, serves as the interface between each pair. What is actually stored in memory aren't words but some sort of combination of roots and morphological rules: a highly inflected language like Turkish can have as many as 10,000 possible words for each word in a poorly inflected language like English; surely, a native speaker of Turkish does not memorize 10,000 times as much as a native speaker of English. Syntax cannot be the only important component of language because a large percentage of utterances stand outside of syntax: things like "Yes", "Hello", "Ouch"; things like "tra-la-la" and "rickety-tickety-tin" have no semantic content either; I wonder where "blah blah blah" and "la dee da" belong.
One interesting chapter in Jackendoff's book is about a possible evolutionary history of language. He thinks that a language without syntax is of course not as expressive as true language but more so than no language at all. There has been a study of the speech of migrant workers who have not had formal instruction in the language of their host countries. It has stripped-down syntax and morphology, the word order is Agent First, Focus Last, and modifiers are adjacent to the word being modified. It is possible that the same was true of "protolanguage". Jackendoff also thinks that English noun compounds like "snowman", "wheelchair" and "garbageman", or even "failed password security question answer attempts limit", are a relic of an earlier stage of the language. The listener knows that a snowman is a sculpture of a man made of snow, a wheelchair is a chair with wheels instead of legs, and a garbageman is a man responsible for hauling away garbage; he does not need syntax to figure it out. I wonder how this squares with Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew, where noun compounding is a major part of syntax, and unlike English, the head noun comes first (for example, in Modern Hebrew, "the holiday candlelight" is "or nerot ha-chag", "light-of candles-of the-holiday").
December 7, 2012
The sub-title is "Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution", and bringing these together in a coherent theoretical framework is the ambition shaping this book. While I am far from being knowledgable enough in the field (any of the many fields being touched upon) to be able to comment on Jackendoff's effort in detail, his thesis that only via such a holistic approach we will have a chance to significantly advance our understanding of thought and language is convincingly presented. At the same time the book is reasonably readable for a non-expert, and the author clearly marks the areas where knowledge ends and speculation begins. Recommended.
April 3, 2009
Really enjoyed this book. No one on goodreads has written anything about it yet? OK, I will. Here you go :
http://burgersmoke.wordpress.com/2009...
http://burgersmoke.wordpress.com/2009...
August 15, 2010
The first part of the book is an excellent serious introduction to modern linguistics. This part by itself is worth reading. It's followed by Jackendoff's proposal for where it should go from here.
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July 26, 2013i want to improve my English language so i want to read this book and am Intrested in m.a Linguistics
stice
stice
September 9, 2014
One of my favorite books as an "introductory" text to thinking about linguistics.
June 14, 2015
I got about 2/3 through it.
I like his clear writing style.
I like his clear writing style.
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