{"product_id":"a-users-guide-to-thought-and-meaning-9780199693207","title":"A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning","description":"\u003cp\u003eHailed as a \"masterpiece\" (Nature) and as \"the most important book in the sciences of language to have appeared in many years\" (Steven Pinker)  Ray Jackendoffs Foundations of Language was widely acclaimed as a landmark work of scholarship that radically overturned our understanding of how language  the brain  and perception intermesh.  A Users Guide to Thought and Meaning is Jackendoffs most important book since his groundbreaking Foundations of Language. Written with an informality that belies the originality of its insights  it presents a radical new account of the relation between language  meaning  rationality  perception  consciousness  and thought  and  extraordinarily  does this in terms a non-specialist will grasp with ease. Jackendoff starts out by looking at languages and what the meanings of words and sentences actually do. Finding meanings to be more adaptive and complicated than theyre commonly given credit for  he is led to some basic questions: how do we perceive and act in the world? How do we talk about it? And how can the collection of neurons in the brain give rise to conscious experience? He shows that the organization of language  thought  and perception does not look much like the way we experience things  and that only a small part of what the brain does is conscious. He concludes that thought and meaning must be almost completely unconscious. What we experience as rational conscious thought--which we prize as setting us apart from the animals--in fact rides on a foundation of unconscious intuition. Rationality amounts to intuition enhanced by language.  Ray Jackendoffs profound and arresting account will appeal to everyone interested in the workings of the mind  in how language links to the world  and in what understanding these means for the way we experience our lives.  Acclaim for Foundations of Language:  \"A book that deserves to be read and reread by anyone seriously interested in the state of the art of research on language.\" --American Scientist  \"A dazzling combination of theory-building and factual integration. The result is a compelling new view of language and its place in the natural world.\" --Steven Pinker  author of The Language of Instinct and Words and Rules  \"A masterpiece. . . . The book deserves to be the reference point for all future theorizing about the language faculty and its interconnections.\" --Frederick J. Newmeyer  past president of the Linguistic Society of America  \"This book has the potential to reorient linguistics more decisively than any book since Syntactic Structures shook the discipline almost half a century ago.\" --Robbins Burling  Language in Society\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45495979114549,"sku":"ByrdShop_019969320X","price":27.41,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780199693207.jpg?v=1780905405","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/a-users-guide-to-thought-and-meaning-9780199693207","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}