The Architecture of the Language Faculty

Ray Jackendoff is Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy and Codirector of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of many books, including Foundations of Language.

Questions, goals, assumptions - universal grammar, necessities and assumptions, syntactocentrism and perfection; interfaces, representational modularity - the 'articulatory-perceptual' interfaces, the phonology-syntax interface, the 'conceptual-intentional' interface, embedding mismatches between syntactic structure and conceptual structure, the tripartite parallel architecture, representional modularity; more on the syntax-semantics interface - enriched composition, aspectual coercions, reference transfer functions, arguments structure alternations, adjective-noun modification, summary, anaphora, quantification, remarks; the lexical interface - lexical insertion versus lexical licensing, PIL=CIL, PIL and CIL are at S-structure, checking argument structure, remarks on processing, the lexicon in a more general mental ecology; lexical entries, lexical rules - broadening the conception of the lexicon, morphosyntax versus morphophonology, inflectional versus derivational morphology, productivity versus semiproductivity, psycholinguistic considerations, 'optimal coding' of semiproductive forms, final remarks; remarks on productive morphology - introduction, the place of traditional morphophonology, phonological and class-based allomorphy, suppletion of composed forms by irregulars, the status of zero inflections, why the lexicon cannot be minimalist; idioms and other fixed expressions - reviews of the issues, the wheel of fortune corpus: if it isn't lexical, what is it? lexical insertion of idioms as Xos, lexical licensing of units larger than Xo, parallels between idioms and compounds, syntactic mobility of (only) some idioms, idioms that are specializations of other idiomatic constructions, relation to construction grammar, summary; epilogue: how language helps us think - introduction, brain phenomena opaque to awareness, language is not thought, and vice versa, phonetic form is conscious , thought is not, the significance of consciousness again, first way language helps us think: linguistic communication, second way language helps us think: making conceptual structure available for attention, third way language helps us think: valuation of conscious percepts, summing up,