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Title: Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution by Ray Jackendoff ISBN: 0-19-926437-6 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: October, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (2 reviews)
Rating: 3
Summary: Worth browsing through
Comment: But not nearly as good as many people would have believe. Jackendoff has an unquestionably good broad grasp of mainstream contemporary research in grammar and cognitive psychology, and his approach to grammatical theory is way saner than mainstream generative grammar. But he is too dismissive of many things he evidently does not understand, like Cognitive Linguistics (which he calls "combinatorial", overusing the most overused word in this book), or anthropologically-oriented approaches to language. This is too bad, because he talks himself into a terrible solipsistic mess in his chapters on semantics (where he attacks "formal", truth-conditional semantics), which, as far as I can see, the only ideas that can get him out are those he dismisses the most casually.
Rating: 5
Summary: Theoretical linguistics you can sink your teeth into..
Comment: On almost every page of this book, I encountered an something which caused my to spontaneously exclaim "exactly!" or "Wow!". I'm wrapping up my masters degree in Linguistics, and had still not found a theoretical framework within which I would have wanted to do research. My exposure to mainstream generative theories (mostly GB and Minimalism) had left me with an empty feeling inside as well as a great number of nagging suspicions that something was fundamentally wrong here. I was starting to turn into a boring anti-Chomskian and was reading up on every lesser-known grammar theory I could find in hopes of finding confirmation of the ideas of language that were starting to take shape in my head. I was also totally perplexed as to how grammar theory was supposed to integrate with psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and evolutionary questions.
To make a long story short, reading this book amounted to the experience of having a premier linguist with decades of professional experience at the forefront of the field say: "Your suspicions are justified, you're not the only one with these questions, here are some possible answers...", and then lay out a theory that convinces through its clarity, descriptive and explanatory power, and psychological and neurological plausibility.
A side effect of reading this book is that I realized it is possible to be a nativist and a proponent of UG in spirit while also embracing advances made in connectionist, probabilistic, and statistical approaches to processing and language learning.
Thanks Ray!
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Title: The Language Instinct : How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker ISBN: 0060958332 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 07 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: On Nature and Language by Noam Chomsky, Adriana Belletti, Luigi Rizzi ISBN: 052101624X Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 10 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $23.00 |
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Title: Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker ISBN: 0060958405 Publisher: Perennial Pub. Date: 15 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities by Gilles Fauconnier, Mark Turner ISBN: 0465087868 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: The Atoms of Language: The Mind's Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker ISBN: 0465005225 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 08 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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