Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental StructureMIT Press, 2009 M01 23 - 432 pages An integrative approach to human cognition that encompasses the domains of language, consciousness, action, social cognition, and theory of mind that will foster cross-disciplinary conversation among linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Ray Jackendoff's Language, Consciousness, Culture represents a breakthrough in developing an integrated theory of human cognition. It will be of interest to a broad spectrum of cognitive scientists, including linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists, neuroscientists, cognitive anthropologists, and evolutionary psychologists. Jackendoff argues that linguistics has become isolated from the other cognitive sciences at least partly because of the syntax-based architecture assumed by mainstream generative grammar. He proposes an alternative parallel architecture for the language faculty that permits a greater internal integration of the components of language and connects far more naturally to such larger issues in cognitive neuroscience as language processing, the connection of language to vision, and the evolution of language. Extending this approach beyond the language capacity, Jackendoff proposes sharper criteria for a satisfactory theory of consciousness, examines the structure of complex everyday actions, and investigates the concepts involved in an individual's grasp of society and culture. Each of these domains is used to reflect back on the question of what is unique about human language and what follows from more general properties of the mind. Language, Consciousness, Culture extends Jackendoff's pioneering theory of conceptual semantics to two of the most important domains of human thought: social cognition and theory of mind. Jackendoff's formal framework allows him to draw new connections among a large variety of literatures and to uncover new distinctions and generalizations not previously recognized. The breadth of the approach will foster cross-disciplinary conversation; the vision is to develop a richer understanding of human nature. |
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... reasons discussed in chapter 1. The notion of rigorously investigating mental structure is familiar from linguistics ... reasons for this situation, there are also scientific reasons, growing out of fundamental assumptions about Preface.
Essays on Mental Structure Ray S. Jackendoff. are also scientific reasons, growing out of fundamental assumptions about the architecture of language, inherited without question from the early days of generative grammar. The chapter ...
... reason is that the words ''representation'' and ''symbol'' imply an interpreter or perceiver: it is not just that this represents or symbolizes that, but implicitly that this represents or symbolizes that to so-and-so. But a person in ...
... reason for doing it this way is developed in detail in chapter 2. For now, the basic point is to segregate the di¤erent kinds of linguistic features into their proper structures. In particular, the fact that the word is pronounced star ...
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