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.
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- Foundations of Language - Ray Jackendoff - Oxford University Press
- Foundations of Language
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His breadth of knowledge and soundness of judgment, along with just the right amount of adventurousness, make for a book that deserves to be read and reread by anyone seriously interested in the state of the art of research on language. I think it is the most important book in the sciences of language to have appeared in many years.
Jackendoff has long had a genius for seeing both he forest and the trees, and he puts his gift to good use here in a dazzling combination of theory-building and factual integration. The result is a compelling new view of language and its place in the natural world. The book as a whole deserves a wide readership. Oxford University Press; 1 edition November 6, Language: Related Video Shorts 0 Upload your video. Try the Kindle edition and experience these great reading features: Share your thoughts with other customers.
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Please try again later. This book is simply one of the best books I've read on linguistics ever. It has completely changed my perspective on linguistics and has convinced me I should do graduate school for it. I recently finished my BA in Linguistics but was becoming disillusioned with minimalist theory and the in my opinion pointless, dogmatic way of thinking on all sides Lakoff and Chomsky come to mind. Jackendoff's book provided a breath of fresh air integrating so many facets from other disciplines in cognitive science and making linguistics relevent, if not at the forefront, of this multi-disciplinary field.
I love his take on making linguistics a discipline more geared towards the sciences and setting a whole new agenda for linguistics discovering the rules and ways the language interfaces interact. If you are intersted in linguistics, language, or just science in general, this book provides a decent intro to linguistcs and other disciplines such as cognitive psychology and neuroscience. It is one book crammed with food for thought concerning the nature of language, thought, and meaning.
Also, I would like to take a moment to discuss the three star review by Idiosyncrat.
Foundations of Language - Ray Jackendoff - Oxford University Press
He says that Jackendoff dismisses things he does not understand such as Cognitive Grammar being combinatorial, and anthropological linguistics, as well as that he talks himself into a "soplipsistic" mess because he dismisses these things. First off, Cognitive grammar is combinatorial and he does not dismiss it. Second, he does not dismiss anthropological linguistics.
He merely comments that their viewpoint is too shallow i.
Foundations of Language
Language has much more too offer and there is a lot more to it than just "we used it to communicate, end of story. If Idiosyncrat read carefully, he would see that Jackendoff does not dismiss an external world. He merely states that we have perceptions of it through our senses and then our brain constructs the conceptual basis of that reality. He does not deny reality, only says that we internalize it to "create" our interpretation of the outside reality.
Also, he is not speculating about this philosophically, he provides an abundance of evidence from the neuropsychology of vision and perception to make his point, and I believe, he is very convincing. Linguistics is a fascinating study and everyone who wants to understand the efforts to analyze how language works should understand a little about linguistics.
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This is an extremely good book on the various branches of linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, and their interrelations. While this is not my field and I cannot judge how fairly Jackendoff characterizes particular lines of theory and research mindful here of an earlier review , never have I learned so much from a single book, and I left it with a profound respect for the care with which scholars of language go about their work, and the quality of the ideas resulting therefrom.
On almost every page of this book, I encountered an something which caused my to spontaneously exclaim "exactly! I'm wrapping up my masters degree in Linguistics, and had still not found a theoretical framework within which I would have wanted to do research. My exposure to mainstream generative theories mostly GB and Minimalism had left me with an empty feeling inside as well as a great number of nagging suspicions that something was fundamentally wrong here. I was starting to turn into a boring anti-Chomskian and was reading up on every lesser-known grammar theory I could find in hopes of finding confirmation of the ideas of language that were starting to take shape in my head.
I was also totally perplexed as to how grammar theory was supposed to integrate with psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and evolutionary questions.
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To make a long story short, reading this book amounted to the experience of having a premier linguist with decades of professional experience at the forefront of the field say: A side effect of reading this book is that I realized it is possible to be a nativist and a proponent of UG in spirit while also embracing advances made in connectionist, probabilistic, and statistical approaches to processing and language learning.
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Attracting a broad readership is important because Jackendoff wants to convince cognitive neuroscientists and psycholinguists to give linguistics another chance and argues that his model provides an impetus for a new dialogue between linguistics and these related fields. To a large extent Jackendoff is successful—his proposals provide an accessible and useable foundation for cross-disciplinary research.
In a similar vein he also urges linguists to adopt a more integrative approach to the study of language and argues that Chomsky-driven "syntactocentrism" must be abandoned. Jackendoff reconfigures generative grammar into a parallel architecture containing a set of components e.
The interfaces are not just between adjacent components e. This latter interface accounts for certain intonational phenomena and lexical items such as ouch, which have a phonological and a semantic structure, but no syntax. In addition, the architecture allows for a connection between semantics conceptual structure and articulatory and perceptual systems—an interface that Jackendoff hypothesizes arises during language evolution but still remains and accounts for phenomena such as onomatopoeia in spoken languages.
For sign languages, this interface might be used to account for the iconic mapping from the articulators to conceptual structures that Taub proposes in her dual-mapping analysis of ASL metaphor. Rathmann and Mathur also use this interface in their account of the use of space in verb agreement and pronominal reference in signed languages. The parallel architecture Jackendoff proposes is extremely promising for studying properties of language that might be unique to signed languages.
Foundations of Language is divided into three parts. The first part Psychological and Biological Foundations lays out the complexities of language that exist in even the simplest sentence—a complexity that nonlinguists often fail to recognize.