Ray Jackendoff

Who is Ray Jackendoff?

Ray Jackendoff 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 as he is both to the existence of an innate Universal Grammar and to giving an account of language that meshes well with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition.

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: Foundations of Language. Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution.