Patterns In The Mind: Language And Human Nature - Hardcover

Jackendoff, Ray S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0465054617 ISBN 13: 9780465054619

Publisher: Basic Books, 1994

Synopsis

What is it about the human mind that accounts for the fact that we can speak and understand a language? Why can't other creatures do the same? And what does this tell us about the rest of human abilities? Recent dramatic discoveries in linguistics and psychology provide intriguing answers to these age-old mysteries. In this fascinating book, Ray Jackendoff emphasizes the grammatical commonalities across languages, both spoken and signed, and discusses the implications for our understanding of language acquisition and loss.

About this title

About the Author

Ray Jackendoff, linguist and theoretical psychologist, is professor of linguistics at Brandeis University. He is the author of several books, including Semantic Interpretation in Generative Grammar, Semantics and Cognition, Consciousness and the Computational Mind, and Semantic Structures.

From Kirkus Reviews

In a challenging, timely, and persuasive argument, Jackendoff (Brandeis; the scholarly Semantics and Cognition, 1983--not reviewed) proposes that language and, by extension, music and visual experience in part culturally engendered--but that, fundamentally, they're expressions of innate, perhaps even genetic, properties of the brain. Redressing the balance between nature and nurture to explain language, Jackendoff contends that language acquisition, a fundamental characteristic of humanity, depends on a universal mental grammar--a set of unconscious grammatical principles that condition the organization, production, and reception of human speech--that's a form of innate knowledge. Considering the ways in which children acquire language (understanding more than they can say, generating speech they haven't heard); American sign language (of which he offers a brief and cogent history); and the learning- impaired and language-deprived, he explores the concepts of this universal grammar. Jackendoff proposes a physiological basis for language in a specialized area of the brain, which can be identified even though its organization is still a mystery. He then extends these principles of universal grammar and innate knowledge to the understanding of music, visual signs, and, most challenging, social interaction. Meaning is ``constructed'' by the innate patterns of the auditor as well as by the speaker, he says, and, by extension, human experience of the world is ``constructed by'' similar unconscious principles--principles that, unlike Freud's unconscious, can never be brought into awareness. In his discussion of semantics, Jackendoff distinguishes between language and thought, between grammar and concept, and between the translatable and the untranslatable, emphasizing human interaction and its implications for society. A powerful, direct, and tidy argument that vindicates Jackendoff's initial purpose: to make linguistics ``part of every educated individual's intellectual repertoire.'' -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0465054617
• ISBN 13: 9780465054619
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256