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Books

Language, Consciousness, Culture: Essays on Mental Structure by Ray Jackendoff

Petter Naessan talks Ray Jackendoff’s cultured thinking.

Prof Ray Jackendoff from Tufts University delivers interesting insights into language and mental structure in this book, demonstrating an awareness of the complexities of the mind and a flair for detail. The Professor explores numerous topics, including the conscious and unconscious aspects of language structure, and fairness, selfishness and morality, among others.

As Jackendoff confesses, the formal analysis of normal, everyday language is “probably a challenge.” Some of the treatment of the well over a hundred example sentences amounts to what I’d call hard core linguistics. It’s quite abstract, and scattered with abbreviations and the technical jargon of formal linguistics.

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