Renowned cognitive scientist and linguist Ray Jackendoff spoke in the Department of Linguistics Linguistic Circle colloquium series as a departmental capstone speaker, on Monday, September 18, 2017. Details are here. Dr. Jackendoff is Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, Boston. He is also a recent recipient of the Rumelhart Prize for distinguished contributions to cognitive science (click here for his Rumelhart Prize lecture at the 2014 meeting of the Cognitive Science Society).
It is difficult to overstate Jackendoff's significance to the fields of linguistics and cognitive science. Among many other things, he is the developer of a unified theory of phrase structure (called X'-syntax), one of the first linguists to link linguistic semantics to conceptual structure, a scholar of music cognition and a specialist in language evolution (see his famous 2005 rebuttal to Chomsky, co-authored with Steven Pinker).
Most recently he has begun to develop a new framework for morphology, the topic of his LingCircle talk, Relational Morphology in the Mental Lexicon. His visit is jointly sponsored by the Institute of Cognitive Science. He gave the ICS Distinguished Speakers colloquium on the Friday prior.