Zellig Harris

Zellig Sabbettai Harris (October 23, 1909 - May 22, 1992) was an American linguist and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis.

Harris was born in Balta, now Odessa oblast, Ukraine, and came with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1913. A student in the Oriental Studies department, he received his bachelor's (1930), master's (1932), and doctoral (1934) degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He began teaching at Penn in 1931, and would go on to found the linguistics department there in 1946--the first such department in the country.

It is widely believed that Harris carried Bloomfieldian ideas of linguistic description to their extreme development: the investigation of discovery procedures for phonemes and morphemes, based on the distributional properties of these units.

His Methods in structural linguistics (1951) is the definitive formulation of descriptive structural work as he had developed it during the 1940s. This book made him famous, but was (and still is) frequently misinterpreted as a synthesis of a "neo-Bloomfieldian school" of structuralism. His socalled discovery procedures are methods for verifying that results, however reached, are validly derived from the data, freeing linguistic analysis from Positivist fears that to be scientific one must progress stepwise from phonetics, to phonemics, to morphology, and so on, without "mixing levels." Beginning with the recognition that speaker judgments of phonemic contrast are the fundamental data of linguistics (not derived from distributional analysis of phonetic notations), his signal contributions in this regard include discontinuous morphemes, componential analysis of morphology and long components in phonology, a substitution-grammar of phrase expansions that is related to immediate-constituent analysis, and above all a detailed specification of validation criteria for linguistic analysis. The criteria lend themselves to differing forms of presentation which have sometimes been taken as competing, but for Harris they are complementary, prescient of intersecting parameters in optimality theory. Consequently, Harris's way of working toward an optimal presentation for this purpose or that was often taken to be "hocus-pocus" with no expectation that there was any truth to the matter. The book includes the first formulation of generative grammar.

Among his most illuminating works are restatements of analyses that bring out the invariant properties of the phenomena. Even in his early publications may be seen his central methodological concern to avoid obscuring the essential characteristics of language under covert presuppositions inherent in conventions of notation or presentation. He later clarified that this is because such notions are dependent upon prior knowledge of and use of language. Natural language, which demonstrably contains its own metalanguage, cannot be based in a metalanguage external to it, and any dependence on a priori metalinguistic notions obscures an understanding of the true character of language.

Deriving from this insight, his aim was to constitute linguistics as a product of mathematical analysis of the data of language, an endeavor which he explicitly contrasted with attempts to treat language structure as a projection of language-like systems of mathematics or logic.

As early as 1939 he began teaching his students about linguistic transformations and the regularizing of texts in discourse analysis. This aspect of his extensive work in diverse languages such as Kota, Hidatsa, and Cherokee, and of course Modern Hebrew, as well as English, did not begin to see publication until his "Culture and Style" (1952a) and "Discourse analysis" (1952b,c). Then in a series of papers beginning with "Co-occurrence and transformations in linguistic structure" (1957) he put formal syntax on an entirely new, generative basis.

Harris recognized, as Sapir and Bloomfield also had stated, that semantics is included in grammar, not separate from it, form and information being two faces of the same coin. (Any specification of semantics other than that given in language can only be stated in a metalanguage external to language.) But grammar as so far developed could not yet treat of individual word combinations, but only of word classes. A sequence or ntuple of word classes (plus invariant morphemes, termed constants) specifies a subset of sentences that are formally alike. He investigated mappings from one such subset to another in the set of sentences. In linear algebra, a transformation is a mapping that preserves linear combinations, and that is how Harris used this term.

Since Harris was Noam Chomsky's teacher, some linguists have questioned whether Chomsky's transformational grammar is as revolutionary as it has been usually considered. The two scholars developed their concepts of transformation on different premisses. For Chomsky, a transformation is an operation mapping a deep structure into a surface structure, which both are hierarchies of abstract symbols generated by the rewrite rules of a phrase-structure grammar. In contrast with Harris's grammars, relations between words must be managed by a separate apparatus for semantics, and their phonological shapes by a separate phonological apparatus.

Harris's transformational analysis enabled the refinement of the word classes found in a grammar of expansions (subsequently, in a grammar of substring combinability), recursively defining semantically more and more specific subclasses according to the combinatorial privileges of words, and progressively approximating a grammar of individual word combinations.

Work on the set of transformations, factoring them into elementary sentence-differences as transitions in a derivational sequence, led to a partition of the set of sentences into an informationally complete sublanguage with neither ambiguity nor paraphrase, and the set of its more conventional and usable paraphrases ("The two systems of grammar: Report and paraphrase" 1969). Morphemes in the latter may be present in reduced form, even reduced to zero; they are recoverable under deformations and reductions of phonemic shape that he termed "extended morphophonemics". Thence, according with the generalization of linear algebra to operator theory, came Operator Grammar. Here at last is a grammar of the entry of individual words into the construction of a sentence. When the entry of an operator word on its argument word or words brings about the string conditions that a reduction requires, it may be carried out; most are optional. Operator Grammar resembles predicate calculus, and has affinities with Categorial Grammar, but these are findings after the fact which did not guide its development or the research that led to it. Recent work on formalization of operator grammar adapts the "lexicon grammar" of Maurice Gross for the complex detail of the reductions.

Perhaps Harris's greatest achievement is articulated in the pair of works A grammar of English on mathematical principles (1982) and A theory of language and information (1991), and exemplified and tested in The form of information in science (1989). Mathematical information theory concerns only quantity of information; here for the first time is a theory of information content. In this last work, Harris ventured to propose at last what might be the "truth of the matter" in the nature of language, what is required to learn it, its origin, and its possible future development. His discoveries vindicate Sapir's recognition, long disregarded, that language is pre-eminently a social artifact.

Harris's enduring stature derives from the remarkable unity of purpose which characterizes his oeuvre. His rigor and originality, as well as the richness of his scientific culture, allowed him to take linguistics to ever new stages of generality, often ahead of his time. He was always interested in the social usefulness of his work, and applications abound, ranging from medical informatics, to translation systems, to speech recognition, to the automatic generation of text from numerical data as heard, for example, on automated weather radio broadcasts. Many workers continue on lines of research that he opened.

Other students of Harris, besides Noam Chomsky, include Joseph Applegate, Lila Gleitman, Michael Gottfried, Maurice Gross, James Higginbotham, Aravind Joshi, Michael Kac, Edward Keenan, Richard Kittredge, Leigh Lisker, Fred Lukoff, Paul Mattick, James Munz, Bruce Nevin. Jean-Pierre Paillet, John ("Haj") Ross, Naomi Sager, Morris Salkoff, Thomas Ryckman, and James Watt.

Works

Some of his works include:

Origin of the Alphabet (M.A. thesis, 1932)
A Grammar of the Phoenician Language (Ph.D. dissertation, 1936)
Development of the Canaanite Dialects: An investigation in linguistic history (1939)
Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951)
String Analysis of Sentence Structure (1962)
Mathematical Structures of Language (1968)
Papers in Structural and Transformational Linguistics (1970)
Notes du Cours de Syntax (1976) (in French)
Papers on Syntax (1981)
A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles (1982)
Language and Information (1988) (ISBN 0231066627)
The Form of Information in Science: Analysis of an immunology sublanguage (1989) (ISBN 9027725160)
A Theory of Language and Information: A mathematical approach (1991) (ISBN 0198242247)
The Transformation of Capitalist Society (1997) (ISBN 0847684121)

External links