The intersecting worlds of Zellig Harris, Noam Chomsky's intellectual and political mentor. In 1995, Robert Barsky met with Noam Chomsky to discuss hiswork-in-progress, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (MIT Press, 1997). Chomsky told Barsky that he shouldfocus his attention instead on midcentury linguist and activist Zellig Harris, who was, Chomsky modestly insisted, more interesting than Chomsky himself. Intrigued, Barsky began to research Harris (1909–1992) and discovered thestory of a major figure in American intellectual life "sitting in a corner in the middle of the room"—part of crucial twentieth-century conversations about language, technology, labor, politics, and Zionism. The intersecting worlds of Harris's intellectualand political activities were populated by such figures as Louis Brandeis, Albert Einstein, Franz Boas, Nathan Glazer, and Chomsky. Barsky describes Harris's work in language studies, and his pioneering ideas about discourse analysis, structural linguistics, and information representation. He also discusses Harris's part in the pre-1948 Zionist movement—when many Jews on the Left envisioned a socialist Palestine that would be a haven not only for persecuted Jews but also for disenfranchised Arabs and anyone seeking a sanctuary against oppression—and recounts Harris's debates on the subject with Brandeis, Einstein, and a large group of students involved with a Zionist organization called Avukah. And Barsky describes Harris's views on capitalism, worker-owner relations, and worker self-management, the legacy ofwhich can be found in some of his students' writings, notably those of Seymour Melman. Barsky shows how Harris, as mentor, teacher, and colleague, powerfully influenced figures who came to dominate the twentieth century's political discussion—; thinkers as different as Noam Chomsky and Nathan Glazer.

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe led to a widespread assumption that capitalism is triumphant and immutable. Harris presents a new interpretation of its self-transformative ability and argues that employee ownership and control is viable

The selection of papers reprinted here traces the development of syntax from structural linguistics through transformational linguistics to operator gram mar. These three are not opposing views or independent assumptions about language. Rather, they are successive stages of investigation into the word combinations which constitue the sentences of a language in contrast to those which do not. Throughout, the goal has been to find the systemati cities of these combinations, and then to obtain each sentence in a uniform way from its parts. In structural analysis, the parts were words (simple or complex, belonging to particular classes) or particular sequences of these. In transformational analysis, it is found that the parts of a sentence are elementary sentences, whose parts in turn are simple words of particular classes. The relation between these two analyses is seen in the existence of an intermediate stage between the two, presented in paper 4, From Morpheme to Utterance. A further intermediate stage is presented in the writer's String Analysis of Sentence Structure, Papers on Formal Linguistics I, Mouton, The Hague 1962 (though it was developed after transformations, as a syntactic rep resentation for computational analysis). Generalization of both of these analyses leads to operator grammar, in which each sentence is derived in a uniform way as a partial ordering of the originally simple words which enter into it: Each step (least upper bound) of the partial ordering (of a word requiring another) forms a sentence which is a component of the sentence being analyzed.

In this, his magnum opus, distinguished linguist Zellig Harris presents a formal theory of language structure, in which syntax is characterized as an orderly system of departures from random combinations of sounds, words, and indeed of all elements of language.

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.

DOES DISCOURSE HAVE A 'STRUCTURE'? HARRIS'S REVOLUTION IN LINGUISTICS As a freshman back in 1947 I discovered that within the various academic divisions and subdivisions of the University of Pennsylvania there existed a something (it was not a Department, but a piece of the Anthropology Department) called 'Linguistic Analysis'. I was an untalented but enthusiastic student of Greek and a slightly more talented student of German, as well as the son of a translator, so the idea of 'Linguistic Analysis' attracted me, sight unseen, and I signed up for a course. It turned out that 'Linguistic Analysis' was essentially a graduate program - I and another undergraduate called Noam Chomsky were the only two undergraduates who took courses in Linguistic Analysis - and also that it was essentially a one-man show: a professor named Zellig Harris taught all the courses with the aid of graduate Teaching Fellows (and possibly - I am not sure - one Assistant Professor). The technicalities of Linguistic Analysis were formidable, and I never did master them all. But the powerful intellect and personality of Zellig Harris drew me like a lodestone, and, although I majored in Philosophy, I took every course there was to take in Linguistic Analysis from then until my gradua tion. What 'Linguistics' was like before Zellig Harris is something not many people care to remember today.