Biographical Memoirs Volume 87 (2005) / Chapter Skim
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Zellig Sabbatai Harris
Zellig Sabbatai Harris
Pages 198-219
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From page 199... ...
, as in an algorithm or computer program, from some explicit set of rules -- and in so doing he exercised a deep and abiding influence on his best-known student, Noam Chomsky; on his many other students; and on all future researchers who yearn to understand language, surely our most distinctively human attribute. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine present-day linguistics, in either its aims or accomplishments, without taking his pioneering work into account, even though the field, as is ideally true of any science, in which progress is attained by later generations' standing on the shoulders of earlier giants (as often as not after first stepping on their toes)
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From page 200... ...
from which the personalities of its practitioners are best held apart. Oddly, perhaps, given his expressed wish to suppress personality in science, his own individual character was strongly expressed and strongly felt.
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From page 201... ...
, in which purviews he was apparently known simply as "Carpenter Harris." Prompting one to picture this great scholar, elegantly balding, slightly stooped and with thickish rimmed spectacles, astride a beam into which he was driving, with a framing hammer, a 10-penny nail. He was, as I understand it, a secular and indeed Socialist Zionist, committed to the independence of Israel (as who is not?
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From page 202... ...
, 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]
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From page 203... ...
In this fashion then, from just the two primitives "N" and "S," a fully developed functor/argument analysis can aim at providing an intriguing reformulation of all the traditional parts of speech and of the phrases, clauses, and sentences they occur in. Such a formal analysis is rather rigid, and perhaps overly limited, but it does suggest a different way of viewing sentences.
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From page 204... ...
Not true. He always admitted that any initial linguistic analysis would depend on what are nowadays called the linguist's "intuitions"; what he aimed to provide were checks on such analyses, what could be called "confirmation procedures." All of his analytic methods were forthrightly stated to be aids to analysis but not infallible ones.
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From page 205... ...
I note in passing that the posited paired relationship between /st/ and /zd/ is not discoverable "automatically," since /st/ could also be paired with some other voiced cluster equally unable to occur initially in English, /dl/ for example (no "dlin")
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From page 206... ...
So Harris's own prejudice remained always in the interests of analysis, despite the fact that a computational grammar, such as the version he pioneered in 1959, can be put to the proof only by generating sentences from it, and despite his having said as early as 1954 that a deep analytic grammar could be viewed as "a set of instructions which generates the sentence of a language." Information of the sort conveyed by "phonemic long components" is nowadays couched rather differently, even though the information (if not its implications) remains much the same.
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From page 207... ...
Once active sentences containing transitive verbs have been shown to be systematically related to passive sentences bearing the same information, as "The boy broke the toy" is related to "The toy was broken by the boy" (e.g., by a simple formula [omitting tense and ignoring many problems and complexities] on the order of "N1 V N2 N2 be Ven by N1")
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From page 208... ...
Harris's continuing main concern with matters of linguistic analysis of productions gleaned from actual speakers and writers could be characterized in modern terms as a concern with "performance" over "competence" (i.e., with physical evidence of what speakers and writers do over hypotheses [or mere conjectures] of what they must have inside their crania to enable them to do it)
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From page 209... ...
An accident of residence -- his apartment and mine were only a block or so apart -- led me often to find myself afoot behind him crossing the Walnut Street Viaduct to the Penn Campus, he not infrequently in his greenish outdoorsman's jacket, with wooden toggles in the stead of buttons and, armed against Philadelphia's blustery weather, a prominent hood. As he marched along across the Schuylkill he would sometimes reach into the side pockets of this capacious garment and fish out various pieces of paper on which, presumably, he had written notes to him
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From page 210... ...
They constitute a set of casual records of a superbly talented linguist's cogitations on language -- probably, given the ordinary evanescence of such things in the destructive course of time, among the best we'll ever have. As to their contents, they were, as just noted, mere notes, except for the letter addressed to me.
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From page 211... ...
He was, in other words, searching through his interior sense of the English language, unrelentingly and unflinchingly, for thorny problems demanding respectful and hopefully explanatory solutions. A model, surely, for any intending language analyst.
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From page 212... ...
(A few of these acceptances were tentative, and there were others whom I solicited but who pled a supervening and perhaps subsequent commitment.) The promised participants in the projected volume included, then, a representative selection of his onetime students (Noam Chomsky chief among them)
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From page 213... ...
Moreover, one couched in such a way as to cause me, the offender, the least pain, partly by basing his declining the proposed honor on his having scuttled a similar tribute to Leonard Bloomfield, one of the earlier gods of linguistics. My reaction, besides of course immediately resolving to cancel the projected Festschrift and to write its promised participants to that effect, was also to arrive at a new respect for the opinions that Harris had just evinced and to conclude that, in his sense, Festschriften are indeed an abomination of a sort.
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From page 214... ...
. His second letter, also dated October 20: "Dear Watt," he wrote (I should explain that, just as in California nobody has a surname, in Philadelphia, except in the case of strangers or when extreme deference is due, a man is typically not addressed by any other)
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From page 215... ...
would be capable of the kind of pettiness it would have taken to sour their relations to the degree some have postulated. I may also mention that in Harris's introduction to his monumental Methods in Structural Linguistics, dated 1947, he gave due credit for "much-needed assistance with the manuscript" to one "N.
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From page 216... ...
216 B I O G R A P H I C A L M E M O I R S always absent! " Without a moment's hesitation Harris replied, "That's false.
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From page 217... ...
New Haven, Conn.: American Oriental Society. 1942 Morpheme alternants in linguistic analysis.
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From page 218... ...
Language 33:283-340. 1964 Transformations in linguistic structure.
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From page 219... ...
Z E L L I G S A B B A T A I H A R R I S 219 1991 A Theory of Language and Information: A Mathematical Approach. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
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