Zellig harris wikipedia

Theory of language

Distributionalism was a general theory of language and a discovery procedure for establishing elements and structures of language based on observed usage.

The purpose of distributionalism was to provide a scientific basis for syntax as independent of meaning.

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Zellig S. Harris was a Russian-born American scholar known for his work in structural linguistics.

Zellig Sabbettai Harris was an influential American linguist, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science.

Barsky describes Harris's work in language studies, and his pioneering ideas about discourse analysis, structural linguistics, and information representation.

Source material on the work of Zellig Harris in language, information, applied mathematics, and the foundations of linguistics.

Zellig Harris defined 'distribution' as follows.^[1]

“The DISTRIBUTION of an element is the total of all environments in which it occurs, i.e. the sum of all the (different) positions (or occurrences) of an element relative to the occurrence of other elements[.]”

Based on this idea, an analysis of immediate constituents could be based on observing the environments in which an element, such as a word, appears in corpora.

Critics of distributionalism, such as Louis Hjelmslev, pointed out that the analysis of occurrence adds nothing to traditional structure analysis, which is based on the hierarchical, step-by-step categorization of elements. Hjelmslev proposed glossematics