The Legacy Of Zellig Harris

The contributions to this volume relect the influence that Zellig Harris has had in syntax, semantics, mathematical linguistics, discourse analysis, informatics, philosophy, phonology and poetics.

Zellig Harris had a profound influence in formal systems and applied mathematics, in demonstrations of the computability of language, and in informatics. Volume 2 begins with a commentary by André Lentin on Harris's grounding in constructivist, intuitionist mathematics, drawing a parallel between Harris's central insights and those of Gödel and others which were of like import in the foundations of mathematics. An international array of scholars describe further developments and relate this work to that of others. Fernando Pereira argues that Harrisian 'linguistic information' can effect a reunion of linguistics with information theory that has not been considered possible since Chomsky's declaration of irrelevance in 1957. Chapters by Richard Oehrle and by Terence Langendoen develop two novel formal systems with intriguing properties. Chapters by Naomi Sager and Ngo Thanh Nhan, by Aravind Joshi, and by Stephen Johnson describe the history of work on the computability of language and project exciting prospects ahead. Karel van den Eynde and colleagues describe use of distributional methods, refined beyond those of Harris, to develop comprehensive computer dictionaries for several languages. The chapter by Benoît Habert and Pierre Zweigenbaum surveys the field of automatic acquisition of information categories, and that by Richard Kittredge surveys work on text generation. Richard Smaby shows how distributional analysis can even inform design of computer user interfaces.

Written by one of the most respected figures in American linguistics, this book develops an approach to the analysis of language on a mathematical model. Harris presents a formal theory of language structure, in which syntax is characterized as an orderly system of departure from random combinings of sounds, words, and all the elements of language. He argues that the combining of words in a sentence constitutes a mathematical object, and that each departure from randomness is a contribution to the structure and meaning of a sentence. Discussing the differences in the structure and content of language, mathematics, and music, Harris shows that the use of language in a science constitutes a distinguishable sub-language. Remarkable and compelling, Harris's magnum opus will be considered the classical analysis of the structuring of information and development of language.

One of the greatest short stories in world literature. »He single-handedly killed the 19th century.« T. S. Eliot »James Joyce revolutionized 20th-century literature.« Time Magazine After a visitation from the dead - through something as concrete as someone singing a particular Irish song - Gabriel Conroy is struck by the profound realization of how superficially he has always loved his wife, Gretta. The image of the falling snow around them, deepening into a cosmic metaphor for life and death as the story progresses, has been called the most beautiful snowfall in literary history. JAMES JOYCE [1882-1941], Irish author, is a key figure in modernist literature with works such as Dubliners [1914], A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [1916], and Ulysses [1922].

In this contrastive grammar the comparisons between French and English structures are formulated as rules which associate a French schema with its translation into an equivalent English one. In doing so, the text presents the general principles needed to build a new translation procedure.