Zellig Harris

Zellig Sabbettai Harris (October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science.

Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language.

These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25.

His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis (adjunction grammar), elementary sentence-differences (and decomposition lattices), algebraic structures in language, operator grammar, sublanguage grammar, a theory of linguistic information, and a principled account of the nature and origin of language.

Harris was born on October 23, 1909, in Balta, in the Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine).

He was Jewish.

In 1913 when he was four years old his family immigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

At age 13, at his request, he was sent to live in Palestine, where he worked to support himself, and for the rest of his life he returned frequently to live on a socialist kibbutz in Israel.

His brother, Dr Tzvi N. Harris, with his wife Shoshana, played a pivotal role in the understanding of the immune system and the development of modern immunology.

His sister, Anna H. Live, was Director of the English Institute (for ESL students) at the University of Pennsylvania (now named the English Language Program).

From the outset of his early work in the 1930s, Harris was concerned with establishing the mathematical and empirical foundations of the science of language then emerging.

He saw that one could not 'explain' language (Saussure's parole) by appeal to a priori principles or competencies (langue) for which language itself provides the sole evidence.

"The danger of using such undefined and intuitive criteria as pattern, symbol, and logical a prioris, is that linguistics is precisely the one empirical field which may enable us to derive definitions of these intuitive fundamental relationships out of correlations of observable phenomena."

Harris received his bachelor's (1930), master's (1932), and doctoral (1934) degrees in the Oriental Studies department of the University of Pennsylvania.

Although his first direction was as a Semiticist, with publications on Ugaritic, Phoenician, and Canaanite, and on the origins of the alphabet; and later on Hebrew, both classical and modern, he began teaching linguistic analysis at Penn in 1931.

His increasingly comprehensive approach saw practical application as part of the war effort in the 1940s.

late 1940s and the 1950s Harris was viewed by his colleagues as a person exploring the consequences of pushing methodological principles right to the edge.

As a close co-worker put it

Zellig Harris's work in linguistics placed great emphasis on methods of analysis.

In 1941, he married the physicist Bruria Kaufman, who was Einstein's assistant in the 1950s at Princeton.

In 1946–1947 he formally established what is said to be the first modern linguistics department in the United States.

Harris's early publications brought him to the attention of Edward Sapir, who strongly influenced him and who came to regard him as his intellectual heir.

Harris also greatly admired Leonard Bloomfield for his work and as a person.

He did not formally study with either.

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 and of antecedent phonetic elements.

From 1949 until his death, Harris maintained a close relationship with Naomi Sager, director of the Linguistic String Project at New York University.

Their daughter, Eva Harris, is a professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of California, Berkeley.

His Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951) is the definitive formulation of descriptive structural work as he had developed it up to about 1945.

This book made him famous, but generativists have sometimes interpreted it as a synthesis of a "neo-Bloomfieldian school" of structuralism.

Rather, Harris viewed his work as articulating methods for verifying that results, however reached, are validly derived from the data of language.

This was in line with virtually all serious views of science at the time; Harris's methods corresponded to what Hans Reichenbach called "the context of justification," as distinct from "the context of discovery."

He had no sympathy for the view that to be scientific a linguistic analyst must progress by stepwise discovery from phonetics, to phonemics, to morphology, and so on, without "mixing levels."

Fundamental to this approach, and, indeed, making it possible, is Harris's recognition that phonemic contrast cannot be derived from distributional analysis of phonetic notations but rather that the fundamental data of linguistics are speakers' judgments of phonemic contrast.

He developed and clarified methods of controlled experiment employing substitution tests, such as the pair test (Harris 1951:32) in which informants distinguish repetition from contrast.

It is probably accurate to say that phonetic data are regarded as fundamental in all other approaches to linguistics.

In the 1960s the couple established residence in kibbutz Mishmar Ha'Emek, in Israel, where they adopted their daughter, Tamar.

For example, Chomsky (1964:78) "assume[s] that each utterance of any language can be uniquely represented as a sequence of phones, each of which can be regarded as an abbreviation for a set of features".

Recognizing the primacy of speaker perceptions of contrast enabled remarkable flexibility and creativity in Harris's linguistic analyses which others - without that improved foundation - labelled "game playing" and "hocus-pocus."

Henry Hoenigswald tells us that in the

Harris died in his sleep after a routine working day at the age of 82 on May 22, 1992, in New York.