Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution

Rating:
Summary: Worth browsing through
Review: 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:
Summary: Worth browsing through
Review: 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:
Summary: Theoretical linguistics you can sink your teeth into..
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: Theoretical linguistics you can sink your teeth into..
Review: 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!

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books I've ever read
Review: This is an extremely good book on the various branches of linguistics, and cognitive linguistics, and their interrelations. While this is not my field and I cannot judge how fairly Jackendoff characterizes particular lines of theory and research (mindful here of an earlier review), never have I learned so much from a single book, and I left it with a profound respect for the care with which scholars of language go about their work, and the quality of the ideas resulting therefrom.