'Review from previous edition A masterpiece. The book deserves a wide readership'John C. Marshall, Nature'An excellent overview of the complexities of language'New Scientist'His breadth of knowlede and soundness of judgment, along with just the right amount of adventurousness, make for a book that deserves to be read and reread by anyone seriously interested in the state of the art of research on language.'Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, American Scientist, July-August 2002'Few books really deserve the cliché "this should be read by every researcher in the field," but Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does. I think it is the most important book in the sciences of language to have appeared in many years. Jackendoff has long had a genius for seeing both the forest and the trees, and he puts his gift to good use here in a dazzling combination of theory-building and factual integration. The result is a compellingnew view of language and its place in the natural world.'Steven Pinker, Professor of Psychology, MIT and author of The Language of Instinct and Words and Rules'Jackendoff tackles the substantial tasks of assessing where Noam Chomsky's foundation of research has led linguistics and reinterpreting his theory of universal grammar.
While embracing many of Chomsky's ideas, Jackendoff proposes his own overall theory of language . a significant piece of scholarship and is highly recommended for academic libraries.'Library Journal (USA)'Jackendoff's work is a sweeping survey of every major aspect of language and communication . He counters the belief that language stems from syntactic structure alone'Science News (USA) March 2002'Jackendoff drastically rehauls linguistic theory, thus providing for its natural re-integration with psycholinguistics and the other sister sciences. Foundations of Language is a monumental scholarly achievement, which should be obligatory reading for any psycholinguist.'Willem J. M. Levelt, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics'Ray Jackendoff, one of the most influential researchers in cognitive science today, offers a clear and engaging analysis of many of the raging controversies in the language sciences.
The book offers a point of entry into these issues for neuroscientists, psycholinguists, and philosophers of language as well as linguists from various generative and cognitive backgrounds. You may not agree with everything he says, but you are bound to appreciate theclarity, precision, depth of analysis, breadth of knowledge and impressive range of data he brings to the debate.'Adele Goldberg, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois'Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language is a masterpiece. The book deserves to be the reference point for all future theorizing about the language faculty and its interconnections.'Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington; President of the Linguistic Society of America.