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The Work of Zellig Harris
The work of Zellig Harris in language, grammar, and information,
and in the methodology of linguistics, is remarkable for its
consistency and integrity over a span of almost 60 years,
culminating in an elegant and comprehensive theory of language and
information.
In his own retrospective
survey (published as Harris 2002b,
and in translation as Harris 1990)
he said "it was possible to describe the entire program from the
outset". Nevertheless, working out its consequences and
demonstrating its results required many years of painstaking work,
with tests in many languages.
A survey of his major publications suggests five stages of
development:
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| 1. Studies of specific
languages |
- A Grammar of the Phoenician
Language (1936).
- Development of the Canaanite Dialects (1939a).
- Hidatsa Texts (1939c).
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| 2. Distributional
methodology |
- Methods in Structural Linguistics (1946/1951a)
- Distributional structure 1954b
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| 3. Transformational analysis |
- Co-occurrence and transformation (1957),
- Transformational
theory (1965) |
| 4. Operator Grammar |
- Mathematical Structures of Language (1968).
- The two structures of grammar (1969)
- A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principals (1982). |
| 5. Linguistic Information |
- Language and Information (1988),
- The Form of Information in Science (1989),
- A Theory of Language and Information (1991).
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Harris worked a subject deeply before
bringing it to publication. The appearance of discrete "stages"
reflects how long it took to work the data of language into
confirmations worthy of presentation. |
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For example, in the course of his
investigations as a Semitist, he laid the foundations for the
distributional methodology (Stage 2), summarized in (1946/1951),
which seems suddenly to have sprung into view in a series of papers
beginning with the (1940)
review of Gray’s Foundations of Language. Similarly,
transformations and the correlation of linguistic form to linguistic
information were evident from the beginning (Harris 1990/2002). When
Leigh Lisker became his student in 1939 he was already teaching
transformational analysis and discourse analysis (Stage 3),
including the work on Hidatsa (1939c)
and Koto (1945f)
texts, more than a decade before it was first published (1952). |
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Harrisian distributionalism is usually
represented as a prime exemplar of the alleged striving of
'Bloomfieldians' to eliminate meaning from linguistics.(*)
In fact, it explicates Leonard Bloomfield’s affirmation that the
form of an utterance and the meaning that it conveys are two aspects
of the same thing. It has a deep connection with the search for
configuration and pattern in language data exemplified by
Edward Sapir, who regarded Harris as his intellectual heir. Harris
was more open than most of his contemporaries to developments in the
Prague school and elsewhere in Europe, such as the work of Roman
Jakobson (e.g. Harris 1951a:
68n18, 79n1, 125n4, 146n48, etc.), who he assisted in getting
established in the U.S. |
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The work on linguistic information
that is made most explicit in Stage 5 is thus the formative theme
underlying all of Harris’s work from the beginning. The correlation
of form and information is the motivation for distributionalism,
discourse analysis, transformational analysis, and the
identification of elementary transformations (1964,
1969). The analysis of
elementary sentence-differences led directly to Operator Grammar
(Stage 4), the "least grammar" (1988:57)
with which we may characterize the informational capacities of
language. Carrying this forward into sublanguage analysis discloses
the information "in" or "carried by" a given utterance. The form of
an utterance, taken within the patterning of the language, is itself
the "semantic representation" of the information "in" the utterance,
as distinct from additional kinds of meaning brought to it by the
recipient. |
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André Lentin (1990)
clarified the mathematical basis of
Harris's work—a question of "how could a little mathematics
transmute itself into linguistics?"—as Harris acknowledged in a 1991 letter to him. The
English translation of Lentin's paper (Lentin 2002)
serves as the introduction to vol. 2 of The Legacy of Zellig
Harris. |