The six chapters that follow fall into two groups. The first three constitute the monograph Language and Mind, published in 1968. As the preface to Language and Mind, reprinted below, explains, the three essays on linguistic contributions to the study of mind (past, present, and future) are based on the Beckman lectures, delivered before a university-wide audience at the University of California, Berkeley, in January 1967. These essays constitute a unit distinct from the three chapters that follow them.

Chapter 4, “Form and meaning in natural languages,” is the approximate text of a rather informal lecture given in January 1969 at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota to an audience consisting largely of high school and college students and teachers. It reviews some of the basic notions presented in Language and Mind and other works, and in addition presents some later work on semantic interpretation of syntactic structures. This material, I believe, reveals some of the limitations and inadequacies of earlier theory and suggests a direction in which this theory should be revised. More technical investigations of this and related matters appear in forthcoming monographs of mine, Semantics in Generative Grammar and Conditions on Rules, to be published by Mouton and Co., The Hague, in 1972.

Chapter 5 is a considerably more technical study, exploring in some detail material that is presupposed or only informally developed in Language and Mind. The intended audience in this case consisted primarily of psychologists and psycholinguists.