24 Facts About Zellig Harris

Zellig Sabbettai Harris was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science.

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

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

Zellig Harris saw that one could not 'explain' language by appeal to a priori principles or competencies for which language itself provides the sole evidence.

Zellig Harris received his bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in the Oriental Studies department of the University of Pennsylvania.

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

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

Zellig Harris developed and clarified methods of controlled experiment employing substitution tests, such as the pair test in which informants distinguish repetition from contrast.

Henry Hoenigswald tells us that in the late 1940s and the 1950s Zellig Harris was viewed by his colleagues as a person exploring the consequences of pushing methodological principles right to the edge.

Zellig Harris's 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.

Zellig Harris kept the introduction of constructs to the minimum necessary to bring together the elements of description into a system.

Zellig Harris's 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.

Zellig Harris argued, following Sapir and Bloomfield, that semantics is included in grammar, not separate from it, form and information being two faces of the same coin.

Zellig Harris investigated mappings from one such subset to another in the set of sentences.

In linear algebra, a mapping that preserves a specified property is called a transformation, and that is the sense in which Zellig Harris introduced the term into linguistics.

Noam Chomsky was Zellig Harris's student, beginning as an undergraduate in 1946.

Zellig Harris was introduced to the symbol-rewriting rules of Post production systems invented some years earlier by Emil Post.

Zellig Harris set about to restate Harris's transformations as operations mapping one phrase-structure tree to another.

Zellig Harris factored the set of transformations into elementary sentence-differences, which could then be employed as operations in generative processes for decomposing or synthesizing sentences.

The influence of Zellig Harris's work is pervasive in linguistics, often invisibly.

Diverse lines of research that Zellig Harris opened continue to be developed by others, as indicated by contributions to.

Zellig Harris was influential with many students and colleagues, though in a less public way, in work on the amelioration of social and political arrangements.

Zellig Harris was committed all his life to radical transformation of society, but from the ground up rather than by revolution directed from the top down.

Zellig Harris resigned as its national President in 1936, the year he obtained the Ph.