Ray S Jackendoff

Biography

Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is also professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities 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, committed as he is both to the existence of an innate Universal Grammar (an 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, culminating in their Generative theory of tonal music. His theory of conceptual semantics developed into a comprehensive theory on the foundations of language, which indeed is the title of a 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 studied under the famed linguists Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 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 from 1971 to 2005. During the 2009 spring semester, he was an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Jackendoff was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 2003. He is the 2014 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize, the premier award in the field of cognitive science.

Research Interest

Semantics of natural language; syntax; general linguistic theory; evolution of language; language and spatial cognition; consciousness; social cognition; music cognition