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Jackendoff bemoans this scarcity of cross-fertilization and fears that the syntacticians in particular—victorious in America due largely to Chomsky's charisma and influence—have grown too introverted to communicate effectively with other thinkers. In this book he fashions a compromise, informed by decades of celebrated work in both syntax and semantics. The book is a magnum opus seeking a model of language compatible with how humans process and produce it online.
Jackendoff criticizes the "syntactocentrism" of Chomskyan work, where the traffic rules are the driving force in how we speak, with other aspects, such as meaning and how we translate thoughts into actual sounds (phonology), as "garnish." But Jackendoff also notes that in practice, syntax and semantics alike are too limited in what they map for either one to be seen as central. In the sentence The chair has a stain on it, the syntax involves a subject (The chair), a verb (has), an object (a stain) and then what is called a prepositional phrase, on it. But this last bit doesn't readily offer anything to the semanticist: what the sentence "means" is that there is a stain on the chair. The on it adds no additional element of "meaning." Chalk up one for the syntacticians.
But then, when the waitress says The ham sandwich over in the corner wants more coffee, her referring to a person by means of what he or she ordered requires a feint of abstraction that has nothing to do with the fact that The ham sandwich is the subject of the sentence. If linguistics seeks to identify how we translate the world around us into speech, then a theory that dismisses things like this as "beside the point" will deserve the charge of navel-gazing.
Jackendoff argues that language is based on three modules of equal importance. The first step in saying something is not the syntactic but the conceptual module, the home of meanings: an utterance begins with the thoughts that it consists of. Syntax comes second: here thoughts are arranged into sequences of words. Jackendoff's conception of syntax is a novel one. Linguists traditionally distinguish between "rules" that we apply regularly (such as "add-ed to a verb to make it past) and things that must be "stored individually" because they are unique, such as individual words or irregular verb forms like bought or went, that we cannot create by applying the regular rules.
Jackendoff discards this division and treats as "stored" everything from words, to idioms like kick the bucket (whose meanings have so little to do with their words that they are essentially "words" in themselves), to "constructions" using words in unusual ways (He belched / cried / spent up a storm), to regular rules like the -ed one.
Indeed, Jackendoff pointedly warns against our temptation to treat such idioms and constructions as mere "static" when any language in fact has thousands of them—they are central to speaking. For him, they constitute a continuum between the extreme poles occupied by words on one end and rules on the other. All of these things are stored in the memory and called upon to create utterances when combined, in an overriding process called "UNIFY." Thus a word (walk) is combined with a rule here ("add -ed for past"), or plugged into a construction like the up a storm one there, and what is universal and innate is the broad default tendencies in how such elements are combined.
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