Ray Jackendoff

Ray Jackendoff is Seth Merrin Professor Emeritus and former co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is currently a Research Affiliate in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT. He has written widely on syntax, semantics, the architecture of grammar, the evolution of language, music cognition, social cognition, and consciousness. He was the recipient of the 2003 Nicod Prize in Cognitive Philosophy and the 2014 David E. Rumelhart Prize for Outstanding Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition, as well as five honorary degrees. His books include Semantics and Cognition (1983), A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (with Fred Lerdahl) (1983), Consciousness and the Computational Mind (1987), Foundations of Language (2002), A User’s Guide to Thought and Meaning (2012), and The Texture of the Lexicon (2020).