Table of Contents

Part I: Psychological and Biological Foundations
1: The Complexity of Linguistic Structure
2: Language as a Mental Phenomenon
3: Combinatoriality
4: Universal Grammar
Part II: Architectural Foundations
5: The Parallel Architecture
6: Lexical Storage Versus Online Construction
7: Implications for Processing
8: An Evolutionary Perspective on the Architecture
Part III: Semantic and Conceptual Foundations
9: Semantics as a Mentalistic Enterprise
10: Reference and Truth
11: Lexical Semantics
12: Phrasal Semantics
13: Concluding Remarks

About the Author

Ray Jackendoff is the author of Semantics and Cognition, Consciousness and the Computational Mind, The Architecture of the Language Faculty, and (with Fred Lerdahl) A Generative Theory of Tonal Music. He has been Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis University since 1971. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

Reviews

The book is ... a fascinating introduction to the world of linguistics. ... I found the book extremely interesting, captivating and important. If you are not sure about certain basic facts in the research of natural language, read this book. It will provide you with quite an objective view of the development of the research of language on all aspects. Linguist List A masterpiece Nature I believe this book has the potential to reorient linguistics more decisively than any book since Syntactic Structures shook the discipline almost half a century ago. Robbins Burling, Language in Society An excellent overview of the complexities of language New Scientist

The book is ... a fascinating introduction to the world of linguistics. ... I found the book extremely interesting, captivating and important. If you are not sure about certain basic facts in the research of natural language, read this book. It will provide you with quite an objective view of the development of the research of language on all aspects. Linguist List A masterpiece Nature I believe this book has the potential to reorient linguistics more decisively than any book since Syntactic Structures shook the discipline almost half a century ago. Robbins Burling, Language in Society An excellent overview of the complexities of language New Scientist