Ray Jackendoff

Ray Jackendoff is an American linguist and philosopher born January 23, 1945, who serves as professor of philosophy and holds the Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities at Tufts University, where he co-directs the Center for Cognitive Studies with Daniel Dennett. His work bridges generative and cognitive linguistics, examining the semantics of natural language and its bearing on the structure of cognition; he developed conceptual semantics theory and wrote the 2002 monograph Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution. With Fred Lerdahl he also developed the generative theory of tonal music, and he earned his PhD from MIT in 1969 under Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, later serving as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 2003.