Ray Jackendoff is Seth Merrin Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Tufts University and a Research Affiliate in Brain and Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has written widely on syntax, semantics, the architecture of grammar, the evolution of language, music cognition, and consciousness. He was the recipient of the 2003 Jean Nicod Prize and the 2014 David Rumelhart Prize, and has served as President of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He is the author of the OUP volumes Foundations of Language: Brain, Meaning, Grammar, Evolution (2002), Simpler Syntax (with Peter Culicover, 2005), Meaning and the Lexicon: The Parallel Architecture 1975-2010 (2010), A User's Guide to Thought and Meaning (2012), and The Texture of the Lexicon: Relational Morphology and the Parallel Architecture (with Jenny Audring, 2019).