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Zellig Sabbetai Harris (born October 23, 1909 – died May 22, 1992) was an American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semitist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language. He also contributed to the investigation in sublanguage grammar, operator grammar, and a theory of linguistic information.

Life

Zellig Sabbetai Harris was born in Balta, Russian Empire, (today’s Ukraine). His middle name, “Sabbatai,” together with his brother’s first name, “Tzvee,” points to the possibility that his parents were the followers of Sabbatai Zevi or Tsvee (1626-1676), a Jewish rabbi who claimed to be the Messiah.

Harris came with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1913, when he was 4 years old. A student in the Oriental Studies department, he received his bachelor's degree in 1930, master's degree in 1932, and doctoral degree in 1934, all from the University of Pennsylvania. He spent his whole professional life at that institution.

Harris 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. He started his career as a Semitist, and spent some time in studying Phoenician and Ugaritic. He published his Development of the Canaanite Dialects in 1939, which was a study of the early history of the Canaanite branch of West Semitic, to which the Phoenician dialects, with Hebrew, Moabite, etc., belong.

In early 1940s Harris turned his focus to the study in general linguistics, which he eventually became famous for. In 1951, he published his famous Structural Linguistics, which became the standard textbook for more than a decade. He also engaged into the new field of computational linguistics, which just emerged with the advancement of first computers (Penn State University participated in the development of the first computer ENIAC).

In 1966 he was named the Benjamin Franklin Professor of linguistics at Pennsylvania State University.

Harris spent many summers working on a kibbutz in Israel. His wife, Bruria Kaufman, was a professor at the Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem, and also worked as an assistant to Albert Einstein at Princeton. Harris actively engaged in advocating for the independence of Israel, and was known as a zealous Zionist. He was active in the Avukah, the student Zionist organization of that time, which flourished on the Penn State during Harris’ time there.

Harris retired in 1979 and died at his home in New York on May 22, 1992.

Work

It is widely believed that Harris carried the linguistic ideas of Leonard Bloomfield 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 up to about 1946. This book made him famous, but was (and still is) frequently misinterpreted as a synthesis of a "neo-Bloomfieldian school" of structuralism. His discovery procedures are methods for verifying that results are validly derived from the data, freeing linguistic analysis from Positivist-inspired restrictions, such as the fear 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 during this period 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 book includes the first formulation of generative grammar.

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.

Linguistic Transformation

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" and "Discourse Analysis" papers in 1952. 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. Grammar, as so far developed, could not yet consist 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 the term that Harris introduced into linguistics.

Since Harris was Noam Chomsky's teacher, beginning as an undergraduate in 1946, 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 premises. Chomsky early adapted Post production systems as formalism for generating language-like symbol systems, and used this for presentation of immediate-constituent analysis. From this he developed phrase structure grammar and then extended it for presentation of Harris's transformations, restated as operations mapping one phrase-structure tree to another. This led later to his redefinition of transformations as operations mapping an abstract deep structure into a surface structure. Because these operations are specified over abstract preterminal nodes (noun phrase, verb phrase, and so on) they cannot make direct reference to words and morphemes, which appear only at the terminal or leaf nodes of a phrase-structure tree by a process of "lexical insertion". As a consequence, co-occurrence restrictions between words must be managed by a separate semantic component injecting a new vocabulary of semantic features into abstract phrase-structure rules. Also because of this, intuitions of paraphrase remained the only available criterion for Chomsky's transformations.

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 two sublanguages: an informationally complete sublanguage with neither ambiguity nor paraphrase, vs. 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; their fully explicit forms are recoverable by undoing deformations and reductions of phonemic shape that he termed "extended morphophonemics". Thence, in parallel 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 reductions 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.

Sublingual Analysis

In his work on sublanguage analysis, Harris showed how the sublanguage for a restricted domain can have a pre-existent external metalanguage, expressed in sentences in the language but outside of the sublanguage, something that is not available to language as a whole. In the language as a whole, restrictions on operator-argument combinability can only be specified in terms of relative acceptability, and it is difficult to rule out any satisfier of an attested sentence-form as nonsense, but in technical domains, especially in sublanguages of science, metalanguage definitions of terms and relations restrict word combinability, and the correlation of form with meaning becomes quite sharp. It is perhaps of interest that the test and exemplification of this in The Form of Information in Science (1989) vindicates in some degree the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It also expresses Harris's lifelong interest in the further evolution or refinement of language in context of problems of social amelioration and in possible future developments of language beyond its present capacities.

Later Career

Harris's linguistic work culminated in the companion books A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles (1982) and A Theory of Language and Information (1991). Mathematical information theory concerns only quantity of information; here for the first time is a theory of information content. In the latter work, also, 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 applied discourse analysis to the languages of science. For example, he and his coworkers studied the sublanguage of immunology. They argued that a change had occurred within a few years in the structure of the medical language as found in numerous immunological publications. They claimed that this change reflected the advancement of knowledge gained in this period. He published in 1989 a 590-page book on that topic.

Legacy

Harris's enduring stature derives from the remarkable unity of purpose which characterizes his work. 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 of it abound, ranging from medical informatics, to translation systems, to speech recognition, to the automatic generation of text from data as heard, for example, on automated weather radio broadcasts. Numerous computer applications, like Medical Language Processor or the Proteus Project, can trace its roots in the Harris’ work

Many workers continue to extend lines of research that he opened. Other students of Harris, besides Noam Chomsky, include among many, Joseph Applegate, Ernest Bender, William Evan, Maurice Gross, James Higginbotham, Aravind Joshi, Michael Kac, Edward Keenan, Richard Kittredge, Leigh Lisker, James Munz, Bruce Nevin, Jean-Pierre Paillet, Naomi Sager, Morris Salkoff, and William Watt.

Publications

Harris, Zellig S. 1936. A Grammar of the Phoenician Language. Doctoral dissertation. Eisenbrauns. ISBN 0940490080
Harris, Zellig S. 1939. Development of the Canaanite Dialects: An Investigation in Linguistic History. Periodicals Service Co. ISBN 0527026905
Harris, Zellig S. 1951. Methods in Structural Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Harris, Zellig S. 1962. String Analysis of Sentence Structure. Mouton
Harris, Zellig S. 1968. Mathematical Structures of Language. Krieger Pub Co. ISBN 0882759582
Harris, Zellig S. 1969. The Two Systems of Grammar: Report and Paraphrase. University of Pennsylvania.
Harris, Zellig S. 1970. Papers in Structural and Transformational Linguistics. Dordrecht: Reidel
Harris, Zellig S. 1976. Notes du Cours de Syntax. Paris: Éditions du Seuil
Harris, Zellig S. 1982. A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles. John Wiley & Sons Inc. ISBN 0471029580
Harris, Zellig S. 1988. Language and Information. Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231066627
Harris, Zellig S. 1991. A Theory of Language and Information: A Mathematical Approach. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198242247
Harris, Zellig S. 1997. The Transformation of Capitalist Society. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. ISBN 0847684121
Harris, Zellig S. 2001 (original published in 1981). Papers on Syntax. Springer. ISBN 9027712662
Harris, Zellig S. 2001 (original published in 1989). The Form of Information in Science: Analysis of an immunology sublanguage. Springer. ISBN 9027725160

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1993. Zellig Sabbettai Harris: A comprehensive bibliography of his writings 1932-1991. Historiographia Linguistica XX, 2/3, 509-522.
Murray, Stephen O. 1994. Theory groups and the study of language in North America. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Nevin, Bruce E. 1993. A minimalist program for linguistics: The work of Zellig Harris on meaning and information. Historiographia Linguistica XX, 2/3, 355-398.
Nevin, Bruce E. 2002. The Legacy of Zellig Harris: Language and Information into the 21st Century (Volume 1). John Benjamins Publishing Co. ISBN 1588112462
Watt, W.C. 2005. Zellig Sabbatai Harris: A biographical memoir. The National Academy Press. Retrieved on March 5, 2007, <http://www.dmi.columbia.edu/zellig/watt.pdf>

External links

All: A Tribute to Zellig Harris – Biography and work of Zellig Harris
Bibliography - Extensive list of Harris's works
Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent: – Influence of Zellig Haris on Chomsky
Penn's Department of Linguistics - The first linguistics department in the U.S.
Review of The Transformation of Capitalist Society – Review by Bruce E. Nevin, March 1997
The legacy of Zellig Harris: Language and information into the 21st century – The article by John Goldsmith
Zellig Harris Home Page – Homepage dedicated to Harris’s work at Columbia University

Credits

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@@ Line 11: / Line 11: @@
 Zellig Sabbetai Harris was born in Balta, Russian Empire, (today’s [[Ukraine]]). His middle name, “Sabbatai,” together with his brother’s first name, “Tzvee,” points to the possibility that his parents were the followers of [[Sabbatai Zevi]] or Tsvee (1626-1676), a Jewish rabbi who claimed to be the [[Messiah]].
-Harris came with his family to [[Philadelphia]], [[Pennsylvania]] in 1913, when he was 4 years old. A student in the Oriental Studies department, he received his bachelor's degree in 1930, master's degree in 1932, and doctoral degree in 1934, all from the [[University of Pennsylvania]]. He spent his whole professional life at that institution.
+Harris came with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1913, when he was 4 years old. A student in the Oriental Studies department, he received his bachelor's degree in 1930, master's degree in 1932, and doctoral degree in 1934, all from the [[University of Pennsylvania]]. He spent his whole professional life at that institution.
 Harris 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. He started his career as a [[Semitic languages|Semitist]], and spent some time in studying Phoenician and Ugaritic. He published his Development of the Canaanite Dialects in 1939, which was a study of the early history of the Canaanite branch of West Semitic, to which the Phoenician dialects, with [[Hebrew]], Moabite, etc., belong.