This volume presents research results, applications, and critical observations related to the work of Zellig Harris. Its readership internationally will include scholars in linguistics, philosophy of science, applied mathematics, computer science, and informatics, among others.
The work of Zellig Harris in language, grammar, and information, and in the methodology of linguistics, is remarkable for its consistency and integrity over a span of almost 60 years. A survey of his major publications suggests that his theory and methods developed in stages:
It is more interesting and revealing to consider the extent to which these "stages" overlapped. Harris worked a subject deeply before bringing it to publication. In the course of his investigations as a Semiticist, he laid the foundations for the distributional methodology (Stage 2) that seems suddenly to have sprung into view in the (1940) review of Gray’s Foundations of Language and in subsequent papers, as summarized in (1951[1947]). Similarly, his work on transformations (Stage 3) long preceded the earliest publications in connection with discourse analysis (1952).
Harris was more open than most of his contemporaries to developments in the Prague school and elsewhere in Europe, such as the work of Roman Jakobson. His methodology has a deep connection with that of Edward Sapir, who regarded him as his intellectual heir. Harrisian distributionalism is usually represented as a prime exemplar of the striving of neo-Bloomfieldians to eliminate meaning from linguistics. In fact, it explicates Leonard Bloomfield’s insight that the form of an utterance and the meaning that it conveys are two aspects of the same thing.
The work on linguistic information that is made most explicit in Stage 5 is thus the formative theme underlying all of Harris’s work, a long process of refining out of grammar all redundancies that are not inherent in language itself, so that the correlation of form and meaning is laid bare. This is the motivation for distributionalism, discourse analysis, transformational analysis, and the identification of elementary transformations (1964, 1969) which led directly to Operator Grammar (Stage 4), the "least grammar" (1988:57) with which we may characterize the informational capacities of language. Carrying this forward into sublanguage analysis discloses the information "in" or "carried by" a given utterance. The form of an utterance, taken within the patterning of the language, is itself the "semantic representation" of the information "in" the utterance, as distinct from additional kinds of meaning brought to it by the recipient.
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