Ray Jackendoff
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Ray Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar (an important thesis of generative linguistics) and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition (the main purpose of cognitive linguistics). Jackendoff's research deals with the semantics of natural language, its bearing on the formal structure of cognition, and its lexical and syntactic expression. He has conducted extensive research on the relationship between conscious awareness and the computational theory of mind, on syntactic theory, and, with Fred Lerdahl, on musical cognition, culminating in their generative theor ...
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Generative Grammar
Generative grammar, or generativism , is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics, deriving ultimately from glossematics. Generative grammar considers grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. It is a system of explicit rules that may apply repeatedly to generate an indefinite number of sentences which can be as long as one wants them to be. The difference from structural and functional models is that the object is base-generated within the verb phrase in generative grammar. This purportedly cognitive structure is thought of as being a part of a universal grammar, a syntactic structure which is caused by a genetic mutation in humans. Generativists have created numerous theories to make the NP VP (NP) analysis work in natur ...
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Cognitive Linguistics
Cognitive linguistics is an interdisciplinary branch of linguistics, combining knowledge and research from cognitive science, cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and linguistics. Models and theoretical accounts of cognitive linguistics are considered as psychologically real, and research in cognitive linguistics aims to help understand cognition in general and is seen as a road into the human mind. There has been scientific and terminological controversy around the label "cognitive linguistics"; there is no consensus on what specifically is meant with the term. Background The roots of cognitive linguistics are in Noam Chomsky’s 1959 critical review of B. F. Skinner’s '' Verbal Behavior''. Chomsky's rejection of behavioural psychology and his subsequent anti-behaviourist activity helped bring about a shift of focus from empiricism to mentalism in psychology under the new concepts of cognitive psychology and cognitive science. Chomsky considered linguistics as a subfie ...
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Santa Fe Institute
The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) is an independent, nonprofit theoretical research institute located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, United States and dedicated to the multidisciplinary study of the fundamental principles of complex adaptive systems, including physical, computational, biological, and social systems. The institute is ranked 24th among the world's "Top Science and Technology Think Tanks" and 24th among the world's "Best Transdisciplinary Research Think Tanks" according to the 2020 edition of the ''Global Go To Think Tank Index Reports'', published annually by the University of Pennsylvania. The institute consists of a small number of resident faculty and postdoctoral researchers, a large group of external faculty whose primary appointments are at other institutions, and a number of visiting scholars. The institute is advised by a group of eminent scholars, including several Nobel Prize-winning scientists. Although theoretical scientific research is the institute's primary foc ...
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Tufts
Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. Tufts remained a small New England liberal arts college until the 1970s, when it transformed into a large research university offering several doctorates;Its corporate name is still "The Trustees of Tufts College" it is classified as a "Research I university", denoting the highest level of research activity. Tufts is a member of the Association of American Universities, a selective group of 64 leading research universities in North America. The university is known for its internationalism, study abroad programs, and promoting active citizenship and public service across all disciplines. Tufts offers over 90 undergraduate and 160 graduate programs across ten schools in the greater Boston area and Talloires, France.
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Morris Halle
Morris Halle (; July 23, 1923 – April 2, 2018) was a Latvian-born Jewish American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonology", he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and '' The Sound Pattern of English'' in 1968 with Chomsky. He also co-authored (with Samuel Jay Keyser) the earliest theory of generative metrics. Life and career Halle was born - as Morris Pinkowitz ( lv, Moriss Pinkovics) - on July 23, 1923, in Liepāja, Latvia. In 1929 he moved with his Jewish family to Riga. He arrived in the United States in 1940 and graduated from George Washington High School. From 1941 to 1943, he studied engineering at the City College of New York. He entered the United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in 1946, at which point he went to the Un ...
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Conceptual Semantics
Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide ''an explanatory semantic representation'' (title of a Jackendoff 1976 paper). ''Explanatory'' in this sense refers to the ability of a given linguistic theory to describe how a component of language is acquired by a child (as proposed by Noam Chomsky; see Levels of adequacy). Recently, conceptual semantics in particular, and lexical semantics in general, have taken on increasing importance in linguistics and psycholinguistics. Many contemporary theories of syntax (how sentences are constructed from individual words) rely on elements that are idiosyncratic to words themselves. As a result, a sound theory accounting for the properties of the meanings of words is required. Meaning and decomposition Jackendoff has claimed that the goal of con ...
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Fred Lerdahl
Alfred Whitford (Fred) Lerdahl (born March 10, 1943, in Madison, Wisconsin) is the Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University, and a composer and music theorist best known for his work on musical grammar and cognition, rhythmic theory, pitch space, and cognitive constraints on compositional systems. He has written many orchestral and chamber works, three of which were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for Music: ''Time after Time'' in 2001, String Quartet No. 3 in 2010, and ''Arches'' in 2011. Life Lerdahl studied with James Ming at Lawrence University, where he earned his BMus in 1965, and with Milton Babbitt, Edward T. Cone, and Earl Kim at Princeton University, where he earned his MFA in 1967. At Tanglewood he studied with Arthur Berger in 1964 and Roger Sessions in 1966. He then studied with Wolfgang Fortner at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg/Breisgau in 1968–69, on a Fulbright Scholarship. From 1991 to 2018 Lerdahl w ...
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Computational Theory Of Mind
In philosophy of mind, the computational theory of mind (CTM), also known as computationalism, is a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition.Piccinini, Gualtierro & Bahar, Sonya, 2012. "Neural Computation and the Computational Theory of Cognition" in Cognitive Science. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.12012 The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher, and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.Horst, Steven, (2005"The Computational Theory of Mind"in ''The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' Despite being vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, Joh ...
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Lexical (semiotics)
Content words, in linguistics, are words that possess semantic content and contribute to the meaning of the sentence in which they occur. In a traditional approach, nouns were said to name objects and other entities, lexical verbs to indicate actions, adjectives to refer to attributes of entities, and adverbs to attributes of actions. They contrast with function words, which have very little substantive meaning and primarily denote grammatical relationships between content words, such as prepositions (in, out, under etc.), pronouns (I, you, he, who etc.) and conjunctions (and, but, till, as etc.). All words can be classified as either content or function words, but it is not always easy to make the distinction. With only around 150 function words, 99.9% of words in the English language are content words. Although small in number, function words are used at a disproportionately higher rate than content and make up about 50% of any English text because of the conventional patter ...
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Cognition
Cognition refers to "the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses". It encompasses all aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: perception, attention, thought, intelligence, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Imagination is also a cognitive process, it is considered as such because it involves thinking about possibilities. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and discover new knowledge. Cognitive processes are analyzed from different perspectives within different contexts, notably in the fields of linguistics, musicology, anesthesia, neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, education, philosophy, anthropology, biology, systemics, logic, and computer science. These and other approaches to the analysis of cognition (such as embodied ...
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Natural Language
In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages can take different forms, such as speech or signing. They are distinguished from constructed and formal languages such as those used to program computers or to study logic. Defining natural language Natural language can be broadly defined as different from * artificial and constructed languages, e.g. computer programming languages * constructed international auxiliary languages * non-human communication systems in nature such as whale and other marine mammal vocalizations or honey bees' waggle dance. All varieties of world languages are natural languages, including those that are associated with linguistic prescriptivism or language regulation. ( Nonstandard dialects can be viewed as a wild type in comparison with stan ...
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