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Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution by Ray Jackendoff (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. 477 pp. $40.00. ISBN 0-19-827012)
MANY SCIENTISTS outside the field of linguistics have been frustrated by the lack of connection between linguistic theory and psycholinguistic models or investigations of the brain bases of language. Jackendoff attempts to bridge this divide by laying out a model of language that clearly relates to models of language processing and that can guide investigations of neural systems underlying language. Given the primary focus of the book, Jackendoff could have stopped with the main title, Foundations of Language, but the subtitle, Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution, was needed to hook cognitive neuroscientists and psycholinguists. Attracting a broad readership is important because Jackendoff wants to convince cognitive neuroscientists and psycholinguists to give linguistics another chance and argues that his model provides an impetus for a new dialogue between linguistics and these related fields. To a large extent Jackendoff is successful-his proposals provide an accessible and useable foundation for cross-disciplinary research. In a similar vein he also urges linguists to adopt a more integrative approach to the study of language and argues that Chomsky-driven "syntactocentrism" must be abandoned.
Jackendoff reconfigures generative grammar into a parallel architecture containing a set of components (e.g., phonological, semantic, syntactic) and interface modules that link the structures within each component. The interfaces are not just between adjacent components (e.g., between syntax and semantics), but also between more distant ones, such as phonology and semantics. This latter interface accounts for certain intonational phenomena and lexical items such as ouch, which have a phonological and a semantic structure, but no syntax. In addition, the architecture allows for a connection between semantics (conceptual structure) and articulatory and perceptual systems-an interface that Jackendoff hypothesizes arises during language evolution but still remains and accounts for phenomena such as onomatopoeia in spoken languages. For sign languages, this interface might be used to account for the iconic mapping from the articulators to conceptual structures that Taub (2001) proposes in her dualmapping analysis of ASL metaphor. Rathmann and Mathur (2002) also use this interface in their account of the use of space in verb agreement and...