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This Is a Review Article on Jackendoff's Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation (Henceforth, LM)

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This Is a Review Article on Jackendoff's Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation (Henceforth, LM) REVIEW ARTICLE Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation, by Ray Jackendoff, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1992, ix+200pp. Reviewed by MITSUAKI YONEYAMA, Seikei University* 0. Introduction This is a review article on Jackendoff's Languages of the Mind: Essays on Mental Representation (henceforth, LM). LM is a collection of papers on semantics and cognition originally written independently within the framework of Conceptual Semantics. There is a certain amount of duplication in their contents, although we can see a consis- tent line of argument. And LM is not a book intended to present an alternative solution to a specific problem. In this paper, I will summa- rize the main points of LM and try to analyze verbs of motion within Conceptual Semantics. 1. Background LM is Jackendoff's fourth book on semantics and cognition. It is in order here to look back at his three previous books because most of the papers in LM are based on his previous books. In Semantics and Cognition (1983) (henceforth, SC), he regards semantics as independent of syntax. In his framework, syntax, seman- tics, and phonology each have their own structure and function. In SC, he mentions four requirements on semantic theory which have * This is a revised version of a paper read at the meeting of Tokyo University English Linguistic Circle in January 1994. Sections 4.1-4.3 are based on a part of a paper read at the symposium on lexical semantics in the 65th General Meeting of the English Literary Society of Japan held at the University of Tokyo in May 1993. I am grateful to John Scahill for checking the English data in this analysis and sug- gesting stylistic improvements. I am also indebted to two anonymous EL reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. Needless to say, all remaining errors and inadequacies are my own. This work was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture, Grant No. 05301057. English Linguistics 11 (1994) 267-290 -267- (C)1994 by the English LinguisticSociety of Japan 268 ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, VOLUME 11 (1994) been widely assumed: (1) Expressiveness, (2) Universality, (3) Com- positionality, and (4) Semantic Properties, and adds two more con- straints. The two constraints are called the Grammatical Constraint and the Cognitive Constraint. The former says that one should prefer a semantic theory that explains otherwise arbitrary generalizations about the syntax and the lexicon (SC: 13) and the latter says that there must be levels of mental representation at which information conveyed by language is compatible with information from other peripheral sys- tems such as vision, non-verbal audition, smell, kinesthesia, and so forth (SC: 16). His idea behind the Cognitive Constraint is that if there were no such levels, it would be impossible for us to talk about what we see and hear. And he proposes the following hypothesis (SC: 17): (1) The Conceptual Structure Hypothesis There is a single level of mental representation, conceptual structure, at which linguistic, sensory, and motor informa- tion are compatible. Jackendoff calls the approach developed in SC Conceptual Semantics. In Consciousness and the Computational Mind (1987) (henceforth, CCM), he tries to solve a fundamental issue of psychology "What makes our conscious experience the way it is?" (CCM: xi) in terms of a computational theory. He discusses language, vision, and music and claims that vision and music resemble language in their organization. These faculties have several levels of mental representation and each representation consists of primitives and principles of combination. He proposes the following hypothesis (CCM: 24): (2) Hypothesis of Conceptual Sufficiency Every phenomenological distinction is caused by/supported by/projected from a corresponding conceptual distinction. This hypothesis says that the organization of awareness is determined by the computational mind.1 (See 3.9) In Semantic Structures (1990) (henceforth, SS), he takes up two basic 1 In CCM, Jackendoff uses two notions of the mind. One, the phenomenologi - cal notion of mind, treats the mind as the seat of conscious awareness. The other, the computational notion of mind, treats the mind as an information-bearing and information-processing system. The computational mind is the locus of understand- ing. REVIEW ARTICLE 269 problems: the Problem of Meaning and the Problem of Correspon- dence. The Problem of Meaning is to develop a formal treatment of semantic intuitions and the Problem of Correspondence is to formalize the relation between syntax and semantics (SS: 1). And in SS, he tries to explore the interaction between these two problems. 2. Contents of LM So far, we have seen the theoretical background of LM. Jackendoff has at least three themes in LM. The first is a reaffirmation of the value of studying the mind in terms of formal symbolic descriptions of information structures (LM: vii). The second theme of the book is the modularity of mind and how it can be further articulated (LM: viii). And finally, he tries to show that it is possible to articulate a theory of the central levels of representation in the mind (LM: viii) LM consists of eight chapters. Chapter 1 "Languages of the Mind" discusses the modularity of mind. Chapter 2 "What is a concept, That a Person May Grasp" summarizes the basic organization of conceptual structure. Chapter 3 "Word Meanings and What It Takes to Learn Them: Reflections on the Piaget-Chomsky Debate" discusses the prob- lem of learning. Chapter 4 "Is There a Faculty of Social Cognition?" develops an argument that there is a module specialized for social cognition. Chapter 5 "Unconscious Information in Language and Psychodynamics" discusses how the theory of mental representation can be applied to issues in psychodynamics. Chapter 6 "Spatial Lan- guage and Spatial Cognition", written with Barbara Landau, is con- cerned with the relation between conceptual structure and spatial repre- sentation. Chapter 7 "Musical Parsing and Musical Affect" examines how musical grammar bears on musical parsing. And finally chapter 8 "Problems of Reality" examines the consequences of the psychological approach to the mind on our view of human experience. In what follows, I will take up the main points of LM and try to clar- ify what Jackendoff has in mind. In section 4, I will analyze verbs of motion, making use of the points brought out in section 3. 3. Theoretical Framework of LM 3.1. Mental Representation At the basis of Jackendoff's theory of the mind lies the notion of 270 ENGLISH LINGUISTICS, VOLUME 11 (1994) mental representation. The computational theory of mind assumes that there are sets of levels of representation. A level of representa- tion consists of a structured repertoire of distinctions encoded by the computational mind. And this structured repertoire is built up from a finite set of primitive distinctions and a finite set of principles of com- bination. The combinatorial principles make it possible to build primi- tives into larger information structures. Jackendoff claims that it is im- possible to make any judgement or discrimination without having an appropriate representation. In LM, the term "level of representation" is a more technical term for a distinct form or "language" of informa- tion structure. Jackendoff says that the power of the brain is in part a result of having many different specialized forms of information many different "languages" of the mind (LM: 4). In LM, he proposes (3) as a fundamental tenet of the computational theory of mind (LM: 5): (3) The Tenet of Constancy Whenever a psychological constancy exists, there must be a mental representation that encodes that constancy. 3.2. Language In LM, Jackendoff takes up three faculties, language, vision, and music, as an illustration of the role of mental representation. As far as language is concerned, including the notion of I-language, Jacken- doff's approach is an extension of Chomsky's generative grammar. He presents the following organization of information structure involved in language (LM: 32): (4) phonological syntactic conceptual formation formation formation rules rules rules auditory vision input phonological syntactic conceptual action structures structures structures motor etc. output rules of inference Jackendoff assumes an autonomous level of syntactic representation. He regards this autonomy as one of the differences between Concep- REVIEW ARTICLE 271 tual Semantics and Cognitive Grammar.2 3.3. Vision As to vision, Jackendoff adopts Marr's (1982) theory of the form of visual information. Jackendoff claims that in order to understand the workings of the mind, we must study not just quantity of information in the brain but also the forms of the information the brain processes. Marr's computational theory of vision characterizes the structure of the visual information. Jackendoff, following Marr, observes that in vi- sion, we should not expect a direct translation from retinal image into visual understanding. He assumes that there are three distinct levels of representation on the way from the retinal array to our visual under- standing: the primal sketch, 21/2D sketch and 3D model. The primal sketch, unlike the unstructured retinal array, is a hierarchical structure. It encodes bars and their terminations as primitives and the termina- tions are grouped into a set of oriented systems. The 21/2D sketch is a viewer-centered level of visual representation. It specifies the geome- try of the surfaces of objects visible to the viewer. There is still no no- tion of physical object. It is the 3D model that represents the notion of object constancy. The 3D model is object-centered and it encodes the shape and size constancy of objects in long-term memory. Jacken- doff tries to make explicit the relation between language and vision by linking conceptual structure and the 3D model.
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