Ray Jackendoff

This book is not only a good reduction of the surface of musical perception to a language amenable to further study, the language it develops is also useful to musicians who frequently reduce or rearrange pieces for different instruments, or want to produce different effects. The chapter on the relationship to linguistics is also an interesting opening for further study.

Good introduction to the universal grammar theory. I do need to go back to Chomsky some time. And very convincing. I was especially surprised by how easy it apparently is to construct a new language, they seem to evolve readily within a generation.Set me wondering about the difference between innate and 'prescribed' grammar... the stuff they teach in school. Can grammar be taught, or does it need to be internalized?The last chapter where he tried to extrapolate the universal grammar to other show more things didn't quite work A grammar of constructed seeing I bought because of my other reading in the area, but his extrapolations into moral and political systems were shaky. He didn't have enough space to develop the ideas to the point where they made sense, and I thought that they weakened the book, even if I do agree with his thoughts on libertarianism. show less

A relatively short and simple presentation of what the author assures us could have been a dense 1000-page treatise. According to him: the semantics component of the human language faculty lies below the level of consciousness; the phonological representations of thoughts are conscious but the thoughts themselves are not; more generally, perceptual structures are conscious but conceptual ones are not; the cognitive perspective can answer some of the questions of metaphysics; rational thought show more ~= intuitive thought + language. All very interesting. show less

A serious inquiry that reformulates linguistic theory by eliminating syntactocentrism and the lexicon/grammar distinction. He aims to make it more compatible with other cognitive sciences and areas far beyond -- all the way to sociology. Includes lots of formal semantic analysis of English verbs and beyond-linguistics concepts.