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Ray Jackendoff
Born
(1945-01-23) January 23, 1945 (age 79)
Alma mater
MIT, Swarthmore
Awards
Fellow of the AAAS Jean Nicod Prize (2003) Rumelhart Prize (2014)
Scientific career
Fields
Generative grammar, cognitive science, music cognition
Institutions
Tufts, Brandeis
Doctoral advisor
Noam Chomsky
Notable students
Neil Cohn
Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is 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 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 of natural language, its bearing on the formal structure of cognition, and its lexical and syntactic expression. He has conducted 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 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 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 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).
RayJackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett...
semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by RayJackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual...
adhering to strong innateness, modularity and autonomy of syntax. Ray S. Jackendoff's model deviates from the traditional generative grammar in that it...
music analysis developed by music theorist Fred Lerdahl and linguist RayJackendoff. First presented in their 1983 book of the same title, it constitutes...
approaches were developed by Mark Steedman as well as Fred Lerdahl and RayJackendoff, who formalized and extended ideas from Schenkerian analysis. More recently...
work in these areas includes books by Maury Yeston, Fred Lerdahl and RayJackendoff, Jonathan Kramer, Christopher Hasty, Godfried Toussaint, William Rothstein...
studied at least since the mid 1990s by linguists James Pustejovsky and RayJackendoff. Logical metonymies are sentences like John began the book, where the...
change, and focuses on Romanticism as a case study. Fred Lerdahl and RayJackendoff analyze how music is structured like a language with its own semiotics...
highly cited of these recent scholars are Maury Yeston, Fred Lerdahl and RayJackendoff, Jonathan Kramer, and Justin London. A melody is a group of musical...
himself as partial to the theoretical frameworks of Peter Culicover and RayJackendoff. McWhorter has argued that languages naturally tend toward complexity...
Generative Theory of Tonal Music, by composer Fred Lerdahl and linguist RayJackendoff). The sum of all notes in a piece is understood to be an all-inclusive...
Jackendoff, Ray (2011). "30. Conceptual Semantics". Semantics. De Gruyter Mouton. doi:10.1515/9783110226614.688. ISBN 978-3-110-22661-4. Jackendoff,...
Contemporary Music Review 6, no. 2 (1992):97–121. Lerdahl, Fred, and RayJackendoff. 1983. A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. MIT Press. Christiane Paul...
grammar, cognition, rhythmic theory and pitch space, he and the linguist RayJackendoff developed the Chomsky-inspired generative theory of tonal music. Lerdahl...
grammars. To begin to understand the listening grammar, Lerdahl and RayJackendoff created a theory of musical cognition, A Generative Theory of Tonal...
the same period) when LF took over this role (previously, Chomsky and RayJackendoff had begun to argue that both deep and surface structure determined meaning)...
evolutionary psychological thinking in linguistics, with Steven Pinker, RayJackendoff and others hypothesising that the human language faculty, or universal...
unit for various research projects in cognitive studies. Daniel Dennett and RayJackendoff are Co-Directors. Center for Cognitive Studies Web site v t e...
Gleitman Adele Goldberg Louis M. Goldstein Joseph Grady Nina Hyams RayJackendoff Pauline Jacobson Mark Johnson George Lakoff Barbara Landau Ronald Langacker...
Generative Theory of Tonal Music (GTTM) proposed by Fred Lerdahl and RayJackendoff. Although GTTM is presented at the algorithmic level of abstraction...
several years as an independent scholar before studying under linguist RayJackendoff and psychologists Gina Kuperberg and Phillip Holcomb at Tufts University...
influenced work in music theory and analysis, such as Fred Lerdahl's and RayJackendoff's generative theory of tonal music. Chomsky is among the most cited authors...
: 125 These characteristics have led linguists and grammarians like RayJackendoff and Steven Paul Abney to categorize such uses of we and you as determiners...
and observed history of the times, including memoirs/interviews with RayJackendoff, Lakoff, Postal, and Ross. The "What happened to Generative Semantics"...
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