Zellig Harris

Zellig Harris

1. He borned in 1909 and died in 1992

2. His linguistic theories has two different approaches to speak about

   • Medionalist view
     • The importance of the combinations between form and meaning in the natural languages
       • Which considers conceptions, for example, formal/nonformal
   • Distributionalist view
     • The connection of each unit of language (phoneme, word, syllabe, etc) in order to define each individual language inside the discurse
       • His study was concerned about Syntax and Phonology because
         • He studied the cathegorized words in a sentence and counted each of these words
           • Which were performed by the speakers

3. He had an empiricist methodology, and many subfields of linguistics lean in this view

   • Historical linguistics
   • Contemporary computacional linguistics
     • Which proposed to solve real linguistic problems with pragmatics rather than providing a model to solve the problems of each language.
   • Descriptive linguistics
   • All corpus linguistics
   • Which concerns logic and the relationship between a scientific statement and observation statements about events in space and time. Data is an integral part because it proves or not the proposed theories.

4. He created the transformational analysis

5. His goal was to use Distributionalism

   • In order to analyze the components of the sentence at different hierarchical levels, as a new linguistic analysis
     • This statement was the basis to establish a science of external linguistic facts.
       • One external linguistic fact is corpora
       • Rather than a science of internalized speaker knowledge
         • The phonemic contrast is derived from the native speaker who is always blending sounds in the distribution of words in the speaking
           • Note: The contrast is not isolated from the context
           • All utterances in language are predictable realizations of a language's choice of phonemes.
             • Sounds are analyzed as segments of speech in no isolation which are pronounced in a certain distribution, according to Harris.
               • Distributional contrasts are relevant while phonetic contrasts are irrelevant.
                 • In the distribution, two sounds are assigned to two morphemens if their differences distinguish one morpheme from another
     • This linguistic analysis consists of building a representation out of a finite number of formal objetcs

6. He was a mathematician who explained syntax using mathematical procedures

   • His central idea wasthat the structure of language can be found from the non-equiprobability combination of parts.
     • Which means that the description of a language is the description of "Contributory departures" from the point of equiprobability.
   • Structure means restrictions on how pieces can be put together
     • Restrictions may be absolute with statements of distribution using mathematical vocabulary