James W. Harris

Last updated
James Wesley Harris
Education MIT (PhD)
Scientific career
Fields linguistics
Institutions MIT
Thesis Spanish phonology  (1967)
Doctoral advisor Morris Halle
Notable students John J. McCarthy

James Wesley Harris is an American linguist and Emeritus Professor of Spanish & Linguistics at MIT. He is known for his works on Spanish. [1] [2] [3]

Books

Related Research Articles

In linguistics and specifically phonology, a phoneme is any set of similar phones that, within a given language, is perceptually regarded as a single distinct sound and helps distinguish one word from another.

Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds, typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins. Syllables are often considered the phonological "building blocks" of words. They can influence the rhythm of a language, its prosody, its poetic metre and its stress patterns. Speech can usually be divided up into a whole number of syllables: for example, the word ignite is made of two syllables: ig and nite.

Hopi is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona, United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Spanish phonology</span> Sound system of Spanish

This article is about the phonology and phonetics of the Spanish language. Unless otherwise noted, statements refer to Castilian Spanish, the standard dialect used in Spain on radio and television. For historical development of the sound system, see History of Spanish. For details of geographical variation, see Spanish dialects and varieties.

In the field of dialectology, a diasystem or polylectal grammar is a linguistic analysis set up to encode or represent a range of related varieties in a way that displays their structural differences.

<i>Syntactic Structures</i> Book by Noam Chomsky

Syntactic Structures is an important work in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, originally published in 1957. A short monograph of about a hundred pages, it is recognized as one of the most significant and influential linguistic studies of the 20th century. It contains the now-famous sentence "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously", which Chomsky offered as an example of a grammatically correct sentence that has no discernible meaning, thus arguing for the independence of syntax from semantics.

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Valley Yokuts is a dialect cluster of the Yokutsan language family of California.

Arnold Melchior Zwicky is an adjunct professor of linguistics at Stanford University and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University. The Linguistic Society of America’s Arnold Zwicky Award, given for the first time in 2021, is intended to recognize the contributions of LGBTQ+ scholars in linguistics and is named for Zwicky, the first LGBTQ+ President of the LSA.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Comanche language</span> Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche people in the United States

Comanche is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Comanche, who split from the Shoshone soon after the Comanche had acquired horses around 1705. The Comanche language and the Shoshoni language are quite similar, but certain consonant changes in Comanche have inhibited mutual intelligibility.

Government Phonology (GP) is a theoretical framework of linguistics, and more specifically of phonology. The framework aims to provide a non-arbitrary account for phonological phenomena by replacing the rule component of SPE-type phonology with well-formedness constraints on representations. Thus, it is a non-derivational representation-based framework, and as such, the current representative of Autosegmental Phonology. GP subscribes to the claim that Universal Grammar is composed of a restricted set of universal principles and parameters. As in Noam Chomsky’s principles and parameters approach to syntax, the differences in phonological systems across languages are captured through different combinations of parameter settings.

A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, some English varieties contrast the vowel of late with that of wait or eight. Other English varieties contrast the vowel of late or wait with that of eight. This non-overlapping pair of phonemes from two different varieties can be reconciled by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late, a second diaphoneme for words like wait, and a third diaphoneme for words like eight.

Mark Jerome Steedman, is a computational linguist and cognitive scientist.

David Arnold Odden is professor emeritus of Linguistics at the Ohio State University. His contributions to linguistics have been in the area of phonology and language description, most notably African tone and the description of Bantu languages. In addition, his work on the obligatory contour principle (OCP) has been instrumental to an understanding of that phenomenon. He is the former editor of Studies in African Linguistics and a current editorial board member of Natural Language and Linguistic Theories.

Junko Itō is a Japanese-born American linguist. She is emerita research professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Sign languages such as American Sign Language (ASL) are characterized by phonological processes analogous to, yet dissimilar from, those of oral languages. Although there is a qualitative difference from oral languages in that sign-language phonemes are not based on sound, and are spatial in addition to being temporal, they fulfill the same role as phonemes in oral languages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harry van der Hulst</span>

Harry van der Hulst is full professor of linguistics and director of undergraduate studies at the department of linguistics of the University of Connecticut. He has been editor-in-chief of the international SSCI peer-reviewed linguistics journal The Linguistic Review since 1990 and he is co-editor of the series ‘Studies in generative grammar’. He is a Life Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and a board member of the European linguistics organization GLOW.

<i>On the Definition of Word</i>

On the Definition of Word is a 1987 book by Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Edwin S. Williams in which the authors examine the notion of word in linguistics. They distinguish four concepts of "word": listemes, morphological objects, syntactic atoms, and phonological words. The authors' main claim is that there is a strict distinction between syntax and morphology.

Michael K. Brame was an American linguist known for his contributions to the field. He served as a professor at the University of Washington and was the founding editor of the peer-reviewed research journal, Linguistic Analysis. Brame's work focused on the development of recursive categorical syntax, also referred to as algebraic syntax, which integrated principles from algebra and category theory to analyze sentence structure and linguistic relationships. His framework challenged conventional transformational grammar by advocating for a lexicon-centered approach and emphasizing the connections between words and phrases. Additionally, Brame collaborated with his wife on research investigating the identity of the author behind the name "William Shakespeare", resulting in several publications. His legacy is marked by his impactful contributions to linguistic theory and his exploration of language intricacies.

Henk van Riemsdijk is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University.

References

  1. Vogel, Irene (1985). "Review of Syllable Structure and Stress in Spanish: A Nonlinear Analysis". Journal of Linguistics. 21 (1): 195–208. doi:10.1017/S0022226700010094. JSTOR   4175770. S2CID   186218885.
  2. Craddock, Jerry R. (1984). "Review of Syllable Structure and Stress in Spanish: A Nonlinear Analysis. Linguistic Inquiry Monographs, 8". Romance Philology. 38 (2): 238–247. JSTOR   44943350.
  3. Patten, Bill Van (February 1985). "SYLLABLE STRUCTURE AND STRESS IN SPANISH: A NONLINEAR ANALYSIS. James W. Harris. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983. Pp. 176". Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 7 (1): 123–124. doi:10.1017/S027226310000526X. S2CID   143673849.