This article presents a critical examination of some of the syntactic procedures of Zellig Harris, and contends that, in several particulars, he has distorted the natural structure of English to make it conform to his theories. Criticism is especially directed at his lack of respect for word divisions and word order; his theory of morphemic long components; his transformation procedures, and his treatment of auxiliaries, zeroed elements and pro-morphemes.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Chatman, S. (1955). Immediate constituents and expansion analysis. Word, 2, 377.
2.
Harris, Z. (1951). Methods in Structural Linguistics (Chicago).
3.
Harris, Z. (1957). Co-occurrence and transformation in linguistic structure. Language, 33, 283.
4.
Wells, R. (1947). Immediate constituents. Language, 23, 81.
