Zellig Harris

Zellig Sabbetai Harris (October 23, 1909 - May 22, 1992) was an American linguist. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis.

Related Topics:
October 23 - 1909 - May 22 - 1992 - Linguist - Semiticist - Structural linguistics - Discourse analysis

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Born in Balta, now Odessa oblast, Ukraine, he and his family moved 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.

Related Topics:
Balta - Odessa oblast - Ukraine - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - 1913 - Bachelor's - 1930 - Master's - 1932 - Doctoral - 1934 - University of Pennsylvania - 1931 - Linguistics - 1946

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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 view of language theory is exposed in his book Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951).

Related Topics:
Bloomfieldian - Phonemes - Morphemes - Distributional

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In subsequent work on discourse analysis, Harris suggested the use of transformations as a means of expanding his method of descriptive analysis to intersentential boundaries. Since Harris was Noam Chomsky's teacher, some linguists have questioned whether Chomsky's transformational grammar is as revolutionary as it has been usually considered, but the two scholars developed their concepts of transformation for different purposes. For Harris, a transformation relates two surface structure forms and is not a procedure to transform a deep structure into a surface structure, as it is in transformational grammar.

Related Topics:
Discourse analysis - Noam Chomsky - Transformational grammar - Surface structure - Deep structure

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Others students of Harris, besides Noam Chomsky, include Maurice Gross, Fred Lukoff, Joseph Applegate, Lila Gleitman, John Ross, and Bruce Nevin.

Related Topics:
Maurice Gross - Fred Lukoff - Joseph Applegate - Lila Gleitman - John Ross - Bruce Nevin

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