Zellig Harris | |
|---|---|
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| Born | October 23, 1909 |
| Died | May 22, 1992 (aged 82) New York City, U.S. |
| Spouse | Bruria Kaufman |
| Children | Eva Harris |
| Academic background | |
| Education | University of Pennsylvania |
| Doctoral advisor | James Alan Montgomery |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Linguist |
| Institutions | University of Pennsylvania |
| Doctoral students | Noam Chomsky Aravind Joshi Naomi Sager Charles Ferguson Fred Lukoff Eugene Garfield Lila Gleitman Ellen Prince |
| Notable students | Maurice Gross |
| Influenced | Noam Chomsky |
| Signature | |
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Zellig Sabbettai Harris (/ˈzɛlɪɡ/; October 23, 1909 – May 22, 1992) was an influential[1] 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.[2] 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.[3]
- ^ R. Harris (1995), Hoenigswald (1996), Hiz (1994), Hymes & Fought (1981), Matthews (1986), R. A. Harris (1993:428-429). "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" (Matthews 1999:1).
- ^ Harris (1990, 2002), Nevin (1993b, 2002a:472 fn 18, 2002b:x fn. 3, 2010:110).
- ^ 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.