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Translation activity of Zellig Sabbettai Harris

Krok N.K.

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Zellig Sabbettai Harris (October 23, 1909 - May 22, 1992) was a renowned American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis and for the discovery of transformational structure in language, all achieved in the first 10 years of his career and published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years, including sublanguage grammar, operator grammar, and a theory of linguistic information, are perhaps even more remarkable.

Harris was born in Balta, now Odessa oblast, Ukraine, and in 1913 at the age of four came with his family to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 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, was teaching descriptive and transformational linguistics as early as 1939, and in 1946-1947 formally established there what is claimed to be the first linguistics department in the United States.

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. His Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951) is the definitive formulation of descriptive structural work as he had developed it up to about 1946. This book made him famous, but is sometimes misinterpreted, from a generativist point of view, as a synthesis of a "neo-Bloomfieldian school" of structuralism. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, according to Henry Hoenigswald, he was viewed by his colleagues as a person exploring the consequences of pushing methodological principles right to the edge. He viewed his work as articulating methods for verifying that results, however reached, are validly derived from the data. This was in line with virtually all serious views of science at the time; Harris's methods corresponded to what Hans Reichenbach called "the context of justification," not to what he called "the context of discovery." He had no sympathy for the view that to be scientific a linguistic analyst must progress stepwise from phonetics, to phonemics, to morphology, and so on, without "mixing levels. "

Fundamental to this approach, and, indeed, making it possible, is Harris' recognition that phonemic contrast cannot be derived from distributional analysis of phonetic notations but rather that the fundamental data of linguistics are speaker judgments of phonemic contrast. He developed and clarified methods of controlled experiment by substitution tests in which informants distinguish repetition from contrast, the most careful formulation of which he called the pair test (Methods p.32). It is probably accurate to say that phonetic data are regarded as fundamental in all other approaches to linguistics. For example, Chomsky (1964: 78)"assume [s] that each utterance of any language can be uniquely represented as a sequence of phones, each of which can be regarded as an abbreviation for a set of features." Recognizing the primacy of speaker perceptions of contrast enabled remarkable flexibility and creativity in Harris's linguistic analyses which others without that improved foundation labelled "game playing" and "hocus-pocus. "

Signal contributions summarized in Methods in Structural Linguistics include discontinuous morphemes, componential analysis of morphology and of long components in phonology, a substitution-grammar of phrase expansions that is related to immediate-constituent analysis, and above all 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. (An analogy may be drawn to intersecting parameters in optimality theory.) Consequently, Harris's way of working toward an optimal presentation for this purpose or that was often taken to be "hocus-pocus" with no expectation that there was any truth to the matter. The book also includes the first formulation of generative grammar.

Harris's central methodological concern beginning with his earliest publications was to avoid obscuring the essential characteristics of language behind unacknowledged presuppositions, such as are inherent in conventions of notation or presentation. In this vein, among his most illuminating works in the 1940s are restatements of analyses by other linguists, done with the intention of bringing out the invariant properties of the linguistic phenomena. This anticipates later work on linguistic universals.

Much later, he clarified the basis of this concern, observing that such hidden presuppositions are dependent upon prior knowledge of and use of language. Since the object of investigation is language itself, properties of language cannot be presupposed without question-begging. Natural language demonstrably contains its own metalanguage, in which we talk about language itself. Natural language cannot be based in a metalanguage external to that intrinsic metalanguage, and any dependence on a priori metalinguistic notions obscures an understanding of the true character of language. Notations for presentation of grammatical information must therefore be kept minimally complex and maximally transparent, what he called a least grammar (Harris 1988, 1991).

As early as 1939, Harris began teaching his students about linguistic transformations and the regularizing of texts in discourse analysis. This aspect of his extensive work in diverse languages such as Kota, Hidatsa, and Cherokee, and of course Modern Hebrew, as well as English, did not begin to see publication until his "Culture and Style" and "Discourse Analysis" papers in 1952. Then in a series of papers beginning with "Co-occurrence and Transformations in Linguistic Structure" (1957) he put formal syntax on an entirely new, generative basis.

Prior to Harris's discovery of transformations, grammar as so far developed could not yet treat of individual word combinations, but only of word classes. A sequence or tuple of word classes (plus invariant morphemes, termed constants) specifies a subset of sentences that are formally alike. 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 Harris introduced the term into linguistics. Harris's transformational analysis refined the word classes found in the 1946 "From Morpheme to Utterance" grammar of expansions. By recursively defining semantically more and more specific subclasses according to the combinatorial privileges of words, one may progressively approximate a grammar of individual word combinations.

This relation of progressive refinement was subsequently shown in a more direct and straightforward way in a grammar of substring combinability resulting from string analysis (Harris 1962).

In his work on sublanguage analysis, Harris showed how the sublanguage for a restricted domain can have a pre-existent external metalanguage, expressed in sentences in the language but outside of the sublanguage, 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 sublanguages of science, metalanguage definitions of terms and relations restrict word combinability, and the correlation of form with meaning becomes quite sharp.

Harris's 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 is a theory of information content. In the latter work, also, Harris ventured to propose at last what might be the "truth of the matter" about the nature of language, what is required to learn it, its origin, and its possible future development.

His discoveries vindicate Sapir's recognition, long disregarded, that language is pre-eminently a social artifact, the users of which collectively create and re-create it in the course of using it.

Harris's enduring stature derives from the remarkable unity of purpose which characterizes his work. His rigor and originality, as well as the richness of his scientific culture, allowed him to take linguistics to ever new stages of generality, often ahead of his time.

He was always interested in the social usefulness of his work, and applications of it abound, ranging from medical informatics, to translation systems, to speech recognition, to the automatic generation of text from data as heard, for example, on automated weather radio broadcasts.

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