Zellig Harris

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Zellig Sabbetai Harris (October 23, 1909 - May 22, 1992) was an 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 syntax.

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 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 so-called discovery procedures are methods for verifying that results, however reached, 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 criteria lend themselves to differing forms of presentation which have sometimes been taken as competing, but for Harris they are complementary, analogously to 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 in this period 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" 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. (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 the term that Harris introduced into linguistics.

Since Harris was Noam Chomsky's teacher, some linguists have questioned whether Chomsky's generative transformational grammar is as revolutionary as it has been usually considered. The two scholars developed their concepts of transformation on different premisses. Adapting Post production systems as a formalism for generating language-like symbol systems, Chomsky had developed phrase-structure grammar for presentation of immediate-constituent analysis, and extended it for presentation of Harris's transformations as operations mapping one phrase-structure tree to another. This led to his redefinition of a transformation as an operation mapping a deep structure into a surface structure. A consequence of this abstract treatment is that 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 by Stephen Johnson on formalization of operator grammar adapts the "lexicon grammar" of Maurice Gross for the complex detail of the reductions.

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. 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. The test and exemplification of this in The Form of Information in Science (1989) is an interesting partial vindication of 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 (e.g., "A Language for International Cooperation" [1962], "Scientific Sublanguages and the Prospects for a Global Language of Science" [1988]).

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'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 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. Many workers continue to extend lines of research that he opened.

Other students of Harris, besides Noam Chomsky, include Joseph Applegate, Lila Gleitman, Michael Gottfried, Maurice Gross, James Higginbotham, Stephen Johnson, 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 William Watt.

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Works

Complete bibliography of Harris's writings. A selection of Harris's works follows.

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