Talk:Zellig Harris
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In response to the wikify note, the article has been rewritten in sections. Is more needed? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bn (talk • contribs) 16:51, 9 June 2008 (UTC)
Very informative and important article. Too bad it's written like an essay to the professor who is familiar with linguistics terms. It was tough going through the article, but worth it.
It seems odd to call him a Russian-American linguist when his family immigrated when he was four years old. He is a quintessential exemplar of American linguistics, in no respect is his linguistic work considered Russian or Russian-American, nor for that matter is Ukraine part of Russia.
[edit] Transformations and paraphrase
I've deleted the erroneous assertion that transformations as developed by Chomsky could only be justified by intuitions of paraphrase. For a start, Chomsky explicitly notes as early as Syntactic Structures that passive sentences are not always precise paraphrases of active sentences because of the effect of surface structure constituency on scope. He gives non-synonymous pairs like "Every linguist speaks two languages" and "Two languages are spoken by every linguist" to show this. What justified the passive transformation was not synonymy between sentences, but rather identity of selectional restrictions between active and passive forms of the same verb. In many other cases, untransformed structures bear no resemblance to English sentences, and it is impossible to have any intuitions about their meaning. For example, it is now commonly assumed that the underlying structure of a sentence like "John gave Bill the book" is something like "John v Bill gave the book", prior to a verb-raising transformation which derives the surface form. Clearly, the meanings of such abstract underlying structures are stipulated -- we do not have any intuitions about them.
The mistake of thinking that Chomsky's transformations are justified by intuitions of synonymy seems to be based on two misconceptions. First, that transformations transform sentences into other sentences. Since the input to a transformation is always an abstract structure, it is impossible to have intuitions of synonymy, since we clearly have no intuitions about the meanings of abstract syntax trees. Second, that base structures are the sole input to interpretation (i.e. generative semantics in one form or another). Chomsky has never assumed this. Cadr 20:27, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
Harris transferred the concept and term transformation directly from linear algebra, where transformations are mappings from subset to subset in a set. Abstract syntactic trees have no place here. Harris's formal criteria for transformation are not dependent upon intuition, and establish these mappings in the set of sentences of a language. In Operator Grammar the verb give is an operator that takes three zero-level arguments. No abstract structure is required, and no rules operating on such a structure. Linearization establishes the linear order of each operator and its arguments; reductions determine the morphophonemic shape of the operator and argument words, including zero allomorphs. [User:bn]] 16:47, 09 June 2008 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bn (talk • contribs)
