Zellig Sabbettai Harris ( ; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science widely considered to have been influential in his fields., , , , . "He … was one of the half dozen or so American linguists whose work has had the greatest influence both in his own country and abroad" . 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.Harris (1990, 2002), Nevin (1993b, 2002a:472 fn 18, 2002b:x fn. 3, 2010:110). 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's account of the nature and origin of language, and its learnability, is in the final chapters of Language and information (1988) and A theory of language and information (1991), and in number four of the Bampton Lectures at Columbia in 1986, on which the former was based.
Biography 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.Friedman, Herman, "Immunity and the Sysiphus Effect", in , pp. 205-207. 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). In 1941, he married the physicist Bruria Kaufman, who was Einstein's assistant in the 1950s at Princeton. In the 1960s the couple established residence in kibbutz Mishmar Ha'Emek, in Israel, where they adopted their daughter, Tamar. 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.
Harris died in his sleep after a routine working day at the age of 82 on May 22, 1992, in New York.
Linguistics From the outset of his early work in the 1930s,Harris (2012). 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." (Repr., with the title "Gray's Foundations of Language", in ), p. 228 (p. 704 of reprint).
Early career and influences 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. In 19461947 he formally established what is said to be the first modern linguistics department in the United States.The press release and archive record are at . Hiż, Henry. n.d. "Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania", an internal document of the Linguistics Department at the University of Pennsylvania. The particular phrase is used on the department website. Claims of precedence, continuity, and 'modernity' are , other contenders being Berkeley, Columbia, Chicago, and Yale.
Harris's early publications brought him to the attention of Edward Sapir, who strongly influenced himHarris, Zellig S., Review of Selected Writings of Edward Sapir. Language 27, No. 3 (1951), 288-333 = Harris 1970:712-764; 1970:712-76; Harris 1970:765-768; Hoenigswald 1996. and who came to regard him as his intellectual heir.Regna Darnell, biographer of Edward Sapir, and independently Victor Golla, an editor of Sapir's collected writings; reported in Nevin (1993:365 fn. 16) and in Nevin (2002a:xiv fn. 8). Harris also greatly admired Leonard Bloomfield for his work and as a person.Hoenigswald (1996), . He did not formally study with either.
Relation to "Bloomfieldian" structuralism
It is widely believedE.g. R. Harris (1995), Hoenigswald (1996), Hymes & Fought (1981), Matthews (1986). that Harris carried Bloomfieldian ideas of linguistic description to their extreme development: the investigation of discovery procedures"I remember having great difficulty in explaining to younger colleagues, who had not followed Harris's work from the 1950s, what he was actually saying. In their demonology he was the man who had tried, and failed, to develop what Chomsky (not he) called 'discovery procedures'. Plainly it did not fit at all with that. But one had to free one's mind of every current prejudice to understand the thinking with which it did fit." (Matthews 1999:113–114) for phonemes and morphemes, based on the distributional properties of these units and of antecedent phonetic elements. 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.R. Harris (1995), Hoenigswald (1996), Hymes & Fought (1981), Matthews (1986).
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."Hoenigswald (1996). 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."Harris (1951a), Hoenigswald (1996), Hymes & Fought (1981:148-149), Matthews (1986), Nevin (1993a:353, 1993b:373 fn. 30).
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.Harris (1951a:29fn1, 34-35), Nevin (1993a, 1993b:366-367). 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. 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."Householder, Fred W. Jr. (1952), "Review of Harris, Zellig S., Methods in Structural Linguistics", International Journal of American Linguistics 18.260-268 (on p. 261); Hoenigswald (1996), Hymes & Fought (1981:150-151), Matthews (1986), Nevin (1993a, 1993b).
Henry Hoenigswald tells us that in the 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. His theoretical results were the product of prodigious amounts of work on the data of language, in which the economy of description was a major criterion. He kept the introduction of constructs to the minimum necessary to bring together the elements of description into a system. His own role, he said, was simply to be the agent in bringing data in relation to data. ... But it was not false modesty that made Harris downplay his particular role in bringing about results, so much as a fundamental belief in the objectivity of the methods employed. Language could only be described in terms of the placings of words next to words. There was nothing else, no external metalanguage. The question was how these placings worked themselves into a vehicle for carrying the 'semantic burden' of language. ... His commitment to methods was such that it would be fair to say that the methods were the leader and he the follower. His genius was to see at various crucial points where the methods were leading and to do the analytic work that was necessary to bring them to a new result.
This, then, is an extension and refinement of the distributional methodology pioneered by Sapir and Bloomfield, investigating which elements of a language can co-occur and which cannot. Given a representation in which contrasting utterances (non-repetitions) are written differently, even a conventional alphabetic orthography, stochastic procedures amenable to statistical learning theory identify the boundaries of words and morphemes. Harris, Zellig (1955), "From phoneme to morpheme", Language 31:190–222. Repr. in Harris (1970) 32–67. Harris, Zellig (1967), "Morpheme boundaries within words: Report on a computer test", Transformations and Discourse Analysis Papers 73. Repr. in Harris (1970) 68–77. In practice, of course, linguists identify words and morphemes by a variety of intuitive and heuristic means. These again are substitution tests. Given words and morphemes, the general method is experimental as follows: substitute one element in a string of such elements, the others in its context being held constant, and then test the acceptability of the new combination, either by finding it in a corpus or by testing its acceptability by users of the language.
Harris's experimental distributional methodology is thus grounded in the subjective judgments of language users: judgments as to repetition vs. imitation, yielding the fundamental data of phonemic contrast, and judgments as to acceptability. Substitution tests using these judgments as criteria identify the "departures from randomness" Harris (1988) 3, 17Harris (1991) 23, 33, 238. that enable language to carry information. This is in contrast to the commonly held view that Harris, like Bloomfield, rejected mentalism and espoused behaviorism.
Major contributions in the 1940s