his theory is to formalize the proper interface rules. While rejecting mainstream generative grammar due to its syntactocentrism, the cognitive semantics school has offered an insight that Jackendoff would sympathize with, namely, that meaning is a separate combinatorial system not entirely dependent upon syntax. Unlike many of the cognitive semantics approaches, he contends that neither syntax alone should determine semantics, nor vice versa. Syntax need only interface with semantics to the degree necessary to produce properly ordered phonological output (see Jackendoff 1996, 2002; Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). Contribution to musical cognition Jackendoff, together with Fred Lerdahl, has been interested in the human capacity for music and its relationship to the human capacity for language. In particular, music has structure as well as a "grammar" (a means by which sounds are combined into structures). When a listener hears music in an idiom he or she is familiar with, the music is not merely heard as a stream of sounds; rather, the listener constructs an unconscious understanding of the music and is able to understand pieces of music never heard previously. Jackendoff is interested in what cognitive structures or "mental representations" this understanding consists of in the listener's mind, how a listener comes to acquire the musical grammar necessary to understand a particular musical idiom, what innate resources in the human mind make this acquisition possible and, finally, what parts of the human music capacity are governed by general cognitive functions and what parts result from specialized functions geared specifically for music (Jackendoff & Lerdahl, 1983; Lerdahl, 2001). Similar questions have also been raised regarding human language, although there are differences. For instance, it is more likely that humans evolved a specialized language module than having evolved one for music, since even the specialized aspects of music comprehension are tied to more general cognitive functions. Selected works See also Conceptual semantics Mentalist postulate List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates X-bar theory References External links Website at Tufts University Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University Ray Jackendoff, Conceptual Semantics, Harvard University, 13 November 2007 (video) Semantics and Cognition, in Shalom Lappin (1996), "The Handbook of Contemporary Semantic Theory", 539–559. Oxford: Blackwell. Possible stages in the evolution of the language capacity, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 3, No. 7 (July 1999). 1945 births Living people Linguists from the United States Semanticists Syntacticians Brandeis University faculty Tufts University faculty Fellows of the American Association