Unconscious Meaning

According to Steven Pinker’s blurb on the dust jacket, ‘‘Ray Jackendoff is a monumental scholar in linguistics who, more than any other scholar alive today, has shown how language can serve as a window into human nature. Combining theoretical depth with a love of revealing detail, Ray Jackendoff illuminates human reason and consciousness in startling and insightful ways.’’ Jackendoff is the author of many books on linguistics and cognition, but in this one he presents an overview of some key concepts to a broad audience. He says that as a traditional scholarly treatise it would be a thousand pages long—if he ever finished it. The usual downside of presenting lots of ideas in a short space is that a book can become, like Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (McGraw-Hill, 1964), too dense for ordinary humans to grasp. But down-to-earth examples, simple diagrams, and a few cartoons—which provide the revealing detail Pinker refers to—make this book a pleasure to read.