Ray Jackendoff

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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).