The special issue of The Linguistic Review on “The Role of Linguistics in Cognitive Science” presents a variety of viewpoints that complement or contrast with the perspective offered in Foundations of Language (Jackendoff 2002a). The present article is a response to the special issue. It discusses what it would mean to integrate linguistics into cognitive science, then shows how the parallel architecture proposed in Foundations seeks to accomplish this goal by altering certain fundamental assumptions of generative grammar. It defends this approach against criticisms both from mainstream generative grammar and from a variety of broader attacks on the generative enterprise, and it reflects on the nature of Universal Grammar. It then shows how the parallel architecture applies directly to processing and defends this construal against various critiques. Finally, it contrasts views in the special issue with that of Foundations with respect to what is unique about language among cognitive capacities, and it conjectures about the course of the evolution of the language faculty. I am honored that The Linguistic Review has suggested Foundations of Language (Jackendoff 2002a, henceforth FL) as a “unifying starting point ” for discussion of the role of

Although for many years a sharp distinction has been made in language research between rules and words—with primary interest on rules—this distinction is now blurred in many theories. If anything, the focus of attention has shifted in recent years in favor of words. Results from many different areas of language research suggest that the lexicon is representationally rich, that it is the source of much productive behavior, and that lexically specific information plays a critical and early role in the interpretation of grammatical structure. But how much information can or should be placed in the lexicon? This is the question I address here. I review a set of studies whose results indicate that event knowledge plays a significant role in early stages of sentence processing and structural analysis. This poses a conundrum for traditional views of the lexicon. Either the lexicon must be expanded to include factors that do not plausibly seem to belong there; or else virtually all information about word meaning is removed, leaving the lexicon impoverished. I suggest a third alternative, which provides a way to account for lexical knowledge without a mental lexicon.

The human language faculty is a bidirectional system, i.e. it can be used by processes of approximately equal computational complexity to understand and to generate utterances of a language. We assume the general framework of optimality theory and treat the language faculty as a constraint-based system where the very same constraints are used both in comprehension and in generation. In the simplest case comprehension and generation can be modelled by unidirectional optimization: finding an optimal interpretations for a given speech input in the case of comprehension; producing an optimal expression for a given message in case of generation. In the simplest case, the speaker and the listener roles are strictly separated. However, there are linguistic observations which indicate that the listener’s and the speaker’s perspectives are integrated to some extent. Bidirectional optimization is an explicit proposal for doing the integration. In this article we propose a general architecture of the language faculty and discuss the precise extent to which speakers are listener-oriented and/or listeners are speaker-oriented. Interestingly, this extent does not seem to vary with regard to the different subsystems considered: the sensorimotor system, the system of grammar proper and the conceptual-intentional system (pragmatics). Though the experimental evidence is not very strong at the moment it seems in online processing the speaker takes the hearer into account but not vice versa. Besides the online (actual processing) view of bidirectionality we discuss bidirectional optimization as an offline phenomenon taking place during language acquisition, and giving rise to fossilization phenomena. 1

The role of default constructions in the processing of mismatch: the case of possessive

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