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Zellig Sabbetai Harris Harris was born in 1909 in Balta, Russia; he left there with his parents in 1913. Completing his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. (1934) at the University of Pennsylvania, he began to teach there in 1931. He eventually founded the first department of linguistics in the United States at that institution. In 1966, he was named to the prestigious position of Benjamin Franklin Professor of Linguistics.

Harris the Revolutionary: Phonemic Theory

Harris is known for his work in structural linguistics and is considered to be the father of discourse analysis. His work ­ which, by the time he died, included Structural Linguistics (1951), Mathematical Structures of Language (1968), Papers in Structural and Transformational Linguistics (1970), Papers on Syntaxê(1981), A Grammar of English on Mathematical Principles (1982), Language and Information (1988), and The Form of Information in Science (1989) ­ was described in the Times Literary Supplement as having a "fascinating consistency," and as being underwritten by a commitment "to study the forms of language in abstraction from their meanings" (Matthews, `"Saying Something'").

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But the book for which Harris is best remembered is Methods in Structural Linguistics (1951), an attempt to organize descriptive linguistics into a single body of theory and practice. On the back cover of the Midway Reprints edition (1986), Norman McQuown makes the following remarks: "Harris's contribution [is] epoch-marking in a double sense: first in that it marks the culmination of a development of linguistic methodology away from a stage of intuitionism, frequently culture-bound; and second in that it marks the beginnings of a new period, in which the new methods will be applied ever more rigorously to ever widening areas in human culture." This book played a vital role in forging the Harris-Chomsky relationship, as Chomsky himself maintains in the introduction to his own great early work, The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory: My formal introduction to the field of linguistics was in 1947, when Zellig Harris gave me the proofs of his Methods in Structural Linguistics to read. I found it very intriguing and, after some stimulating discussions with Harris, decided to major in linguistics as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania. I had some informal acquaintance with historical linguistics and medieval Hebrew grammar, based on my father's work in these fields, and at the same time was studying Arabic with Giorgio Levi Della Vida. (25) While I do not want to suggest a parallel here, it is still notable that Marx and Engels contributed to the study of linguistics through their explorations of the nature and essence of language; Voloshinov and Bakhtin, as well as Lukács, also worked in the domain of linguistics from a Marxist perspective; and Gramsci had a background in linguistics. But it was not Harris's linguistics that first attracted Chomsky: he was tantalized by his professor's politics. Indeed, Chomsky commented that "in the late 1940s, Harris, like most structural linguists, had concluded that the field was essentially finished, that linguistics was finished. They had already done everything. They had solved all the problems. You maybe had to dot a couple of i's or something but essentially the field was over" (qtd. in Randy Allen Harris 31). Harris was, according to Chomsky, "a really extraordinary person who had a great influence on many young people in those days." Although a linguistics professor, "he had a coherent understanding of this whole range of issues, which I lacked, and I was immensely attracted by it, and by him personally as well, also by others who I met through him." "[A] person of unusual brilliance and originality," Harris encouraged Chomsky to take graduate courses in philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Morton White, and mathematics with Nathan Fine. During this period Chomsky was considering dropping out: "I suppose Harris had in mind to influence me to return to college, though I don't recall talking about it particularly, and it all seemed to happen without much planning" (Chomsky Reader 7, 8).

Karen Horney Current writing on Sullivan's interpersonal theory

Chomsky had also begun to read works suggested to him by Harris, such as those of the Sullivan-Horney-Rapoport school of psychoanalysis. The field of psychoanalysis was familiar to Chomsky because he had read Freud on the insistence of his uncle (the newsstand operator, who eventually became a psychoanalyst). His first encounter with Freud's works had occurred when he was an adolescent, and it had left Chomsky "much impressed," although "on re-reading years later I was appalled, frankly. So I didn't re-do that when Harris talked about it (a lot), but did follow his particular interest" (31 Mar. 1995).

Critiques & Controversies of Erik Erikson Humanistic psychology background note

Harris introduced the young Chomsky to some well-known figures in the field of psychoanalysis: "He took me to visit Rapoport, one of the very few people in his circle I ever met (maybe Erikson was there too ­ it was at their clinic in Connecticut, I think)." A passionate interest in psychoanalysis had also led Harris to the Frankfurt School, notably to the work of Erich Fromm. This approach, which included studying on a very theoretical level the relationship between psyche and social movements, did not engage Chomsky, despite his bond with Harris: "I could never get much interested in any of this, or in most of the other things that were of interest to Harris and his circle apart from the left-Zionist (anti-state) things . . ." (31 Mar. 1995).

Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, today

Drawn in by his professor's political work, his linguistic studies, and his unacademic approach, Chomsky began to realize that Harris had become his main reason for remaining in university. Harris encouraged the kind of unstructured, lively, and creative debate that had been a mainstay of Chomsky's early education and upon which he had thrived in the company of his uncle in New York. Course requirements, formal relationships, and scholarly hierarchies were rejected in favor of informal gatherings, broad-based discussions, and intellectual exchange. The University of Pennsylvania's linguistics department comprised, at that time, a very small group of graduate students who shared an enthusiasm not only for linguistics, but also for politics. They shunned the classroom, and met either at the nearby Horn and Hardart Restaurant or at Harris's apartment in Princeton or New York. The discussions could last for days, and Chomsky remembers them as being "intellectually exciting as well as personally very meaningful experiences" (Chomsky Reader 8). Chomsky ultimately received an unconventional B.A. degree from the University of Pennsylvania, which reflected his interest in linguistics, philosophy, and logic. His B.A. honor's thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew," which set the stage for some of his later work and which is taken to be the first example of modern generative grammar, was completed in 1949 when he was just twenty years old. That same year, while they were both still students, Chomsky married Carol Schatz, with whom he shared an array of interests, including Jewish culture and history, language studies, and philosophy. Carol was later to work in the area of linguistics herself. At the time of her marriage, she was also active in political issues, but in very different ways from Noam.