The Architecture of the Language Faculty

Over the past twenty-five years, Ray Jackendoff has investigated many complex issuesin syntax, semantics, and the relation of language to other cognitive domains. He steps back in thisnew book to survey the broader theoretical landscape in linguistics, in an attempt to identify someof the sources of the widely perceived malaise with respect to much current theorizing.Starting fromthe "Minimalist" necessity for interfaces of the grammar with sound, meaning, and the lexicon,Jackendoff examines many standard assumptions of generative grammar that in retrospect may be seenas the product of historical accident. He then develops alternatives more congenial to contemporaryunderstanding of linguistic phenomena.The Architecture of the Language Faculty seeks to situate thelanguage capacity in a more general theory of mental representations and to connect the theory ofgrammar with processing. To this end, Jackendoff works out an architecture that generates multipleco-constraining structures, and he embeds this proposal in a version of the modularity hypothesiscalled Representational Modularity.Jackendoff carefully articulates the nature of lexical insertionand the content of lexical entries, including idioms and productive affixes. The resultingorganization of the grammar is compatible with many different technical realizations, which he showscan be instantiated in terms of a variety of current theoretical frameworks.Linguistic InquiryMonograph No. 28