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ZELLIG SABBATAI HARRIS

Zellig S. Harris was one of the half-dozen linguists, since the beginning of the serious study of language a little after 1800, whom anyone conversant with the field would label a genius.

His works contributed to American anthropology, methodologies of scientific research, and linguistic information. In addition, he made contributions to worker self-management, Zionism¹, and efforts to transform capitalist society in the direction of scientific socialism. Harris not only strove to advance the cause of socialist Zionism, but he also shaped the destinies of many influential thinkers, including Murray Eden, Nathan Glazer, Seymour Melman, Chester Rapkin, and his most famous student, Noam Chomsky. Therefore, he exerted considerable influence upon crucial currents of 20th-century work, while fostering an inner circle of acolytes, friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers who have each contributed significantly to an array of fields and projects. On the political front, he worked to update earlier versions of scientific socialism through careful study of industrial society, a passion he shared with Paul Mattick and the astronomer and social thinker Anton Pannekoek. And his work on Zionism, reflected in particular by his contributions to the idea of a nonstate region in Palestine that would be a homeland for suffering peoples around the world, retain a currency even today by the ambition and prescience of his approach.

Biography

Zellig Sabbetai Harris was born on October 23, 1909, in Balta, Russia, (today’s Ukraine). Some say that he was born in North Ossetia, now a constituent republic of the Russian Federation.

His middle name, “Sabbatai,” set beside his brother’s first name, “Tzvee,” appears to identify the family as followers of Sabbatai Tzvee or Tsvee (1626-1676), the “False Messiah of the Caucasus.”

Harris came with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1913, when he was four years old. 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. A student in the Oriental Studies department, he received his bachelor's degree in 1930, master's degree in 1932, and doctoral degree in 1934, all from the University of Pennsylvania. He spent his whole professional life at that institution.

Harris began teaching in 1931, and in 1946-1947 he formally established what is said to be the first modern linguistics department in the United States. He started his career in Semitic languages, and spent some time in studying Phoenician and Ugaritic. He published his Development of the Canaanite Dialects in 1939, which was a study of the early history of the Canaanite branch of West Semitic, to which the Phoenician dialects, with Hebrew, Moabite, and others belong.

In the early 1940s, Harris turned his focus to the study of general linguistics, for which he eventually became famous. In 1951, he published his Structural Linguistics, which became the standard textbook for more than a decade. He also engaged with the new field of computational linguistics, which just emerged with the advancement of first computers (Penn participated in the development of the first computer, ENIAC).

In 1966, he was named the Benjamin Franklin Professor of linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Harris spent many summers working on a kibbutz in Israel. His wife, Bruria Kaufman, was a professor at the Weizmann Institute in Jerusalem, and also worked as an assistant to Albert Einstein at Princeton. Harris actively engaged in advocating for the independence of Israel, and was known as a zealous Zionist. He was active in the Avukah, the student Zionist organization of that time, which flourished on the Penn campus during Harris’ time there.

His daughter, Eva Harris, is now a professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of California, Berkeley, and the President of the non-profit organization Sustainable Sciences Institute.

Zellig S. Harris retired in 1979. He died at home on May 22, 1992, midway through his eighty-second year.

Linguistics

Harris’s scholarly career seems to fall into several successive phases. During his early years (in the 1930s) he devoted himself to Semitics, having been a very early analyst of the then-new Ugaritic materials; at this point he was looked upon as a quite promising Semitist. Sometime around World War II he applied himself to more general problems in linguistics, the culmination of which was the completion in 1947, with long-delayed publication in 1951, of his magisterial Methods in Structural Linguistics (later reprinted in paperback as just Structural Linguistics), which became the standard text for the next decade and more, and which cognoscenti still regard as a classic. A little later he devoted himself to two other areas of research: computational linguistics, which was just becoming possible owing to the ready availability of computers (which had after all been invented at Penn, as ENIAC); and, above all, transformational analysis, which he had begun working on earlier in his career, an approach in which simpler sentences (“The archer shot the arrow”) can be “transformed” by general rules into more complex ones (“The arrow was shot by the archer”), and vice versa. His activity in the first of these two areas (he spearheaded development of the first truly functional computational syntactic analyzer [on a UNIVAC]) presumably arose quite naturally from his lifelong interest in analytic techniques. His work in the second eventuated from his interest in analyzing texts into simpler ones bearing the same information (a concern that never left him).

And then toward the end of his life he developed a method of linguistic analysis that viewed sentences as being generated from a formally simple application of factors to their arguments (he used somewhat different terms). Such an analysis views all syntactic relationships in the same light, therefore subsuming the relationships traditionally termed “modification” (as when an adjective modifies a noun) and “predication” (in which a verb is predicated of its subject) or more broadly, “agreement” (as when “this” is pluralized to agree with “books” in “these books”) and “government” (as when “me” rather than “I” is mandated when the object of “kissed” in “Jenny kissed ___”: no “Jenny kissed I”).

Bloomfield’s structuralism

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. 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.

Major contributions in the 1940s

Harris's contributions to linguistics as of about 1945 as summarized in Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951) include componential analysis of long components in phonology, componential analysis of morphology, discontinuous morphemes, and a substitution-grammar of word- and phrase-expansions that is related to immediate-constituent analysis,but without its limitations. With its manuscript date of January 1946, the book has been recognized as including the first formulation of the notion of a generative grammar.

The overriding aim of the book, and the import of the word "methods" in its original title, is a detailed specification of validation criteria for linguistic analysis. These criteria lend themselves to differing forms of presentation that have sometimes been taken as competing. Harris showed how they are complementary. ("It is not that grammar is one or another of these analyses, but that sentences exhibit simultaneously all of these properties.") Harris's treatment of these as tools of analysis rather than theories of language, and his way of using them to work toward an optimal presentation for this purpose or that, contributed to the perception that he was engaged in "hocus-pocus" with no expectation that there was any absolute truth to the matter.

Harris also concluded that a science that aims to determine the nature of language is limited to investigation of the relationships of the elements of language to one another (their distribution). Indeed, beginning with the fundamental data of linguistics, the phonemic contrasts, all the elements are defined relative to one another.

Linguistics as applied mathematics

Deriving from this insight, Harris's aim was to apply the tools of mathematics to the data of language and establish the foundations of a science of language. ("The problem of the foundations of mathematics was more topical than ever just at the time when Harris took charge of the 'homologous' enterprise of establishing linguistics on a clear basis.") "We see here then nearly fifty years during which, to realize the program that he established very early, Zellig Harris searched and found in mathematics some of his supports." He contrasted with attempts by others to project the properties of language from formal language-like systems. "The interest ... is not in investigating a mathematically definable system which has some relation to language, as being a generalization or a subset of it, but in formulating as a mathematical system all the properties and relations necessary and sufficient for the whole of natural language."

Transformational structure in language

As early as 1939, Harris began teaching his students about linguistic transformations. They had immediate utility to enhance the regularity of repetition patterns in texts (discourse analysis). By 1946 he had already done extensive transformational analysis in diverse languages such as Kota, Hidatsa, and Cherokee, and of course Hebrew (ancient and modern), as well as English, but he did not feel this was ready for publication until his "Culture and Style" and "Discourse Analysis" papers in 1952. A later series of papers beginning with "Co-occurrence and Transformations in Linguistic Structure" (1957) developed a more general theory of syntax.

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. A particular application of the concern about presuppositions and metalanguage, noted above, is that any specification of semantics other than that which is immanent in language can only be stated in a metalanguage external to language (which would call for its own syntactic description and semantic interpretation).

Operator grammar

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. These are of two kinds, the incremental operations which add words, and the periphrastic operations which change the phonemic shapes of words. The latter, Harris termed "extended morphophonemics". This led to a partition of the set of sentences into two sublanguages: an informationally complete sublanguage with neither ambiguity nor paraphrase, vs. the set of its more conventional and usable paraphrases ("The Two Systems of Grammar: Report and Paraphrase" 1969). In the paraphrastic set, morphemes may be present in reduced form, even reduced to zero; their fully explicit forms are recoverable by undoing deformations and reductions of phonemic shape.

Sublingual analysis

In his work on sub-language analysis, Harris showed how the sub-language for a restricted domain can have a pre-existent external metalanguage, expressed in sentences in the language but outside of the sub-language, something that is not available to language as a whole. 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 sub-languages of science, metalanguage definitions of terms and relations restrict word combinability, and the correlation of form with meaning becomes quite sharp. It is perhaps of interest that the test and exemplification of this in The Form of Information in Science (1989) vindicates in some degree the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It also expresses Harris' lifelong interest in the further evolution or refinement of language in the context of problems of social amelioration and in possible future developments of language beyond its present capacities.

Later career

Harris' 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 was 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 vindicated Sapir's recognition, long disregarded, that language is predominantly a social artifact.

Harris applied discourse analysis to the languages of science. For example, he and his coworkers studied the sub-language of immunology. They argued that a change had occurred within a few years in the structure of the medical language as found in numerous immunological publications. They claimed that this change reflected the advancement of knowledge gained in this period. In 1989, he published a 590 page book on that topic.

Endorsements

“Zellig Harris is deservedly well known for his outstanding contributions to linguistics, but far less so for his broad impact on contemporary American intellectual life, in part through the influence of his deep insights into social forces and scientific integrity on students and many others who were fortunate enough to have had direct contact with him, of whom I was privileged to be one. Barsky’s inquiry provides a welcome introduction to the life and work of a fascinating person with remarkable talents, and the many circles in which he was a central and animating figure.”— Noam Chomsky

“Zellig Harris’s dream of a secular, leftist Zionism, built on cooperation with the indigenous Arab population, has been dashed by history. But his legacy stubbornly survives, not only in the pioneering work he did in the field of linguistics, but also in the inspiration he provided Noam Chomsky, the most outspoken political gadfly of our day. In this rigorously researched, sympathetically cast biography, Robert Barsky rescues from oblivion a figure from the past who may still have much to teach the future.”

Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley.

References:

National Academy of Sciences: Zellig Sabbatai Harris. A Biographical Memoir by W. C. Watt. Volume 87, published 2005 by the National Academies Press Washington, D.C http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/harris-zellig.pdf

Сайт The MIT Press (Eng.) [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/zellig-harris

Сайт Oxford Bibliographies [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199772810/obo-9780199772810-0145.xml

Сайт New World Encyclopedia [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Zellig_Harris

Сайт свободной электронной энциклопедии Wikipedia [Электронный ресурс]. – Режим доступа: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zellig_Harris

1^ Zionism (Hebrew: צִיּוֹנוּת‎ Tsiyyonut [t͡sijo̞ˈnut] after Zion) is the national movement of the Jewish people that supports the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in the territory defined as the historic Land of Israel (roughly corresponding to Canaan, the Holy Land, or the region of Palestine).

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