American linguist and academic (born 1909)

Zellig Harris

Zellig Sabbettai Harris was an American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science widely considered to have been influential in his fields. 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. These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis, elementary sentence-differences, algebraic structures in language, operator grammar, sublanguage grammar, a theory of linguistic information, and a principled account of the nature and origin of language.