Social Cognitive Career Theory

Zellig Harris: From American

Linguistics was a late arrival on the academic scene. Until the 1950s, few dedicated departments existed, but then the combination of Noam Chomsky’s revolutionary theory of generative grammar and Cold War subsidies ushered in an exceptional boom. Grammarians of ancient tongues (most notably, Panini for Sanskrit and Marcus Terentius Varro for Latin) pioneered the systematic study of language, and European philologists in the 19th century brought it up to standards of scientific rigor, but the modern discipline owes a particular debt to a brilliant, heterogeneous array of American Jewish linguists.

Chomsky, whose work also helped unleash a broader “cognitive revolution” beyond linguistics, is the most famous, but similarly decisive contributions to the field came from Franz Boas and Edward Sapir (anthropological linguistics), Leonard Bloomfield (structural linguistics), William Labov (sociolinguistics), Joseph Greenberg (linguistic typology), Steven Pinker (cognitive linguistics) and Uriel Weinreich (language contact). The leading role played by American Jews in the social sciences is nowhere more apparent than in linguistics, as if Jewish traditions of multilingualism and textual analysis had been transmuted into investigations of far-flung languages and dissections of syntax.

Whether or not this distinguished list should include Zellig Harris, the subject of Robert Barsky’s new biography, is a matter of debate. As Chomsky’s teacher and the author of the 1951 book “Methods in Structural Linguistics,” Harris was certainly an important forerunner, if not a founding figure, of transformational analysis — part and parcel of the Chomskian project of revealing “deep structure” in language and discovering linguistic universals. On an institutional level, he also established one of the country’s earliest linguistics departments, at the University of Pennsylvania.

His later work filtered down into the development of computational linguistics, information retrieval and methods of processing text into data — the engines that invisibly power the digital age and the progress of science. Yet today, Harris is largely forgotten, his writings seldom read, even by specialists. With the rise of more nuanced, empirical approaches focused on the roles that language plays in society, the hold of Chomskian theory over linguistics seems to grow weaker with each passing year.

Barsky, a professor at Vanderbilt University who has written two books on Chomsky’s intellectual background and his political thought, begins by announcing that Harris was “an original thinker who came to define, rather than follow, a version of what it meant to be a Jewish intellectual in America.” Harris’s political work — first as an influential leader within the left-wing Zionist student organization Avukah (“torch” in Hebrew) and later as a theoretician of socialism — is given equal billing with his linguistic research.

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