Meaning and the Lexicon: The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010

by Ray S. Jackendoff

Meaning and the Lexicon brings together 35 years of pathbreaking work on language by Ray Jackendoff. It traces the development of his Parallel Architecture, in which phonology, syntax, and semantics are independent generative components, and in which knowledge of language consists of a repertoire of stored structures. Some of these structures, such as words and morphemes, are idiosyncratic mappings between phonology, syntax, and meaning; some, such as idioms, attach meaning to larger syntactic structures; other structures are purely syntactic or morphosyntactic; and yet others are pieces of meaning with no syntactic or phonological form. The Parallel Architecture also seeks to explain and understand how language is integrated with human cognition, particularly with vision.

Professor Jackendoff examines inherently meaningful syntactic constructions, incorporating insights from Construction Grammar; and he looks at how aspects of meaning can be unexpressed but nevertheless understood, integrating approaches from Generative Lexicon theory. A recurring focus is the balance in grammar between idiosyncrasy, regularity, and semiregularity. The chapters cover a wide range of phenomena, from well-studied domains such as the mass-count distinction, event structure, resultatives, and noun-noun compounds, to offbeat aspects of English grammar such as the time-away construction ( We're twistin' the night away ), contrastive focus reduplication ( Do you LIKE-him-like him? ) and the noun-preposition-noun construction ( week after week ).

Ray Jackendoff draws on work in a wide range of fields, including linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy. His writing combines depth of thought with clarity and wit. Meaning and the Lexicon will be read and enjoyed by linguists of all theoretical persuasions, and will be of great interest to cognitive scientists, philosophers, and anyone interested in how language operates in the mind, brain, and human communication.

Genres: Linguistics

504 pages, Paperback

First published May 2, 2010

Reviews

[John Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked his earlier book on the same topic. He seems to realise the importance of high-frequency collocations in syntactic analysis of language. He has a model that maps directly from word sequences to semantics, rather than via syntactic analysis. From an Artifical Intelligence perspective, this should lead to new, more intelligent and more compact computer programs for analysing text.

I finished this over summer 2014. Previously I had read Bresnan's book on Lexical Functional Grammar, which had quite a lot of examples (but restricted to syntax, not semantics), and I missed these examples with Jackendoff's book.
Going through the videos on YouTube by Chomsky and Pinker, the linguistic community now seems to be talking generally about "interfaces", as Jackendoff does. But the idea of parallel processing at multiple levels in the brain, (in a "pipeline" although Jackendoff does not use the term) seems still to be restricted to Jackendoff. You need this to explain the high speed of top down processing in psycholinguistics ("he's got a shoe" vs. "he's going to shoot" in that video example that is currently doing the rounds on TV programs on psychology). That might be on YouTube if you look for it. ("Susan Blackmore: The Mystery of Consciousness", might discuss this).

Previously I had dipped into Pollard and Sag's "HPSG" (which is very hard going) and the much earlier reports by Gazdar et al on GPSG.

So now I feel fairly well-equipped to reason at the linguistic, as well as the computational linguistic level.

I think you need a number of different viewpoints onto the same phenomena, to build a good model. I read all the Pinker books on linguistics as well, and although his style is rather anecdotal, he does treat many areas important to doing computational linguistics, which is my field.

Anyway, my programs now work to my satisfaction. Next step is to extract ontologies from Wikipedia.