He was one of the half-dozen linguists, since the beginning of the serious study of language a little after , whom anyone conversant with the field would label a genius.
Harris spent his entire scholarly life, until his retirement in , at the University of Pennsylvania. He earned all of.
He taught many, myself included, to probe deep and to respect the data; he was a merry but exacting taskmaster; he was venerated by all who knew him, surely, and by many was held in warm affection. Oddly, perhaps, given his expressed wish to suppress personality in science, his own individual character was strongly expressed and strongly felt.
Around such a person, inevitably, legends abound. One of them concerns his reclusiveness. This she did with great relish. Which was fine, since all of his courses, however titled, covered a vast domain. In my Penn. Harris was born in North Ossetia, now a constituent republic of the Russian Federation, but was taken by his family to Philadelphia when he was but four years old.
He was, as I understand it, a secular and indeed Socialist Zionist, committed to the independence of Israel as who is not? During his early years in the s he devoted himself to Semitics, having been a very early analyst of the then-new Ugaritic materials; at this point he was looked upon as a quite promising Semitist. Sometime around World War II he applied himself to more general problems in linguistics, the culmination of which was the completion in , with long-delayed publication in , of his magisterial Methods in Structural Linguistics later reprinted in paperback as just Structural Linguistics , which became the standard text for the next decade and more, and which cognoscenti still regard as a classic.
His activity in the first of these two areas he spearheaded development of the first truly functional computational syntactic analyzer [on a UNIVAC] presumably arose quite naturally from his lifelong interest in analytic techniques.
His work in the second eventuated from his interest in analyzing texts into simpler ones bearing the same information a concern that never left him. And then toward the end of his life he developed a method of linguistic analysis that viewed sentences as being generated from a formally simple application of functors to their arguments he used somewhat different terms.
Such an analysis views all syntactic relationships in the same light, therefore sub-. Such a formal analysis is rather rigid, and perhaps overly limited, but it does suggest a different way of viewing sentences. The resulting characterization may seem a little forced—and it is—but it does present an interesting new way of viewing syntax. Not true. In this manner we could encapsulate simple facts about the English language, and facts well worth the capturing if we are to understand any language at all.
For Harris, at least in the s, such advances were made in the interest of achieving the simplest possible analytic account of the language. For Harris this assumption, however inviting, could. It might well have surprised Harris to learn that his analytic devices might turn out to be superior in cognitive reality, should they do so; but science, of course, consists in large part of surprises.
In this case, surely not. How about this? Are functors on arguments revealing of different aspects of that speech? Then let all these methods be brought into play, that each may disclose a different aspect of language in all its performative complexity with all, perhaps, in the aggregate, revealing language as a whole. Like all of my fellow students, I think, I revered Zellig Harris as mentor and as resident genius; like more than a few, I had a warm affection for him, in my own case as a sort of intellectual father.
This affection was only increased by my personal interactions with him, not just in his office, once regularly admitted, but also, more casually, on the streets of Philadelphia. As he marched along across the Schuylkill he would sometimes reach into the side pockets of this capacious garment and fish out various pieces of paper on which, presumably, he had written notes to him-. They fluttered down like the inscribed leaves that, in legend at least, some Chinese poets, uncaring of posterity, used to toss into the nearest creek.
Sometimes I wondered how many potential dissertations, by us his epigones, floated down those then-noisome waters, to be swept eventually into the Delaware and then out to the Atlantic. Some of these notes, though, have survived, for I still have a few in my possession, since he at one point delegated me to be his inquirer into the tangled web of English adverbs and so passed on to me his jottings thereanent.
They make interesting reading. As to their contents, they were, as just noted, mere notes, except for the letter addressed to me. He was, in other words, searching through his interior sense of the English language, unrelentingly and unflinchingly, for thorny problems demanding respectful and hopefully explanatory solutions.
Volume 1 begins with a survey article by Harris himself, previously unavailable in English. Ryckman, Paul Mattick, Maurice Gross, and Francis Lin show the importance of Harris's methodology for philosophy of science, the first two with reference especially to his remarkable findings on the form of information in science. Morris Salkoff, Peter Seuren, and Lila Gleitman present diverse developments in syntax and semantics.
Daythal Kendall applies operator grammar to literary analysis of Sapir's Takelma texts, and Fred Lukoff's chapter describes benefits of string analysis for language pedagogy. The background of transformational and metalanguage analysis.
Consequences of the metalanguage being included in the language. Grammatical specification of scientific sublanguages. Accounting for subjectivity point of view. Some new results on Transfer Grammar. Pseudoarguments and pseudocomplements. The voiceless unaspirated stops of English.
On the bipartite distribution of phonemes. Operator grammar and the poetic form of Takelma texts. A practical application of string analysis. Zellig Sabbettai Harris: A comprehensive bibliography of his writings, Graffi, Giorgio Harris, Chomsky and the origins of transformational grammar.
This site was originally created by Stephen B. Empirical Linguistics of Zellig S. Harris Source material on the work of Zellig Harris in language , information, applied mathematics, and the foundations of linguistics.
Overview Formal methods of analysis Linguistics as an empirical science, with applications in natural language processing, parsing, and generation. Theory of science sublanguages With applications in the organization and management of information in medicine, science, and technology. Theory of Information With applications in data processing, information extraction, information retrieval, knowledge acquisition and machine learning.
Universal theory of language With applications in language comparison and classification, language learning in children and adults, and an account of the origin and evolution of language.
Four seminal lectures on the theory of language and information: Shows how words carry meaning and how sentences carry information. Explains the properties of language, with a plausible account of its origin and development which we may be just beginning. Indicates what is needed to know a language, and that child language requires no special explanatory principles.
Audio recordings with transcripts. Selected Computer Applications. Book of Ongoing Research.
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