Robert Lees (linguist)

Robert B. Lees (9 July 1922 – 6 December 1996) was an American linguist.

Education

Lees went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956 to work on its machine translation project. He first came to notice with an influential review of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957), and his 1960 book The Grammar of English Nominalizations. Lees was later dismissed by Victor Yngve from his research position, as he had wanted to continue working on straight linguistics rather than on machine translation. He then enrolled in the electrical engineering department at MIT, where he obtained his PhD in linguistics under Chomsky.

Career

Lees was the first Head of the Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1965 to 1968. In 1969, Lees moved to Israel at the Tel Aviv University and in 1970, he established the first linguistics department there.

Lees also went to India on a tour under the patronization of the Ford Foundation. He taught intensive courses on contemporary linguistics at Delhi University and at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad.

Lees was known as a fierce partisan of Chomsky's brand of linguistics, and could be withering in his criticism. A famous example is his response when informed that Nelson Francis had received a grant to produce the Brown Corpus: "That is a complete waste of your time and the government's money. You are a native speaker of English; in ten minutes you can produce more illustrations of any point in English grammar than you will find in many millions of words of random text." ^[1]

Selected works

• The Phonology of Modern Standard Turkish. Routledge Curzan. ISBN 978-0-7007-0806-2
• English for Turks. Spoken Language Serv 1981, ISBN 978-0-87950-614-8
• with Braj B. Kachru, Yacov Malkiel, Angelina Pietrangeli: Issues in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Henry and Renee Kahane. University of Illinois Press 1974, ISBN 978-0-252-00246-5
• The Grammar of English Nominalizations
• The Basis of Glottochronology. Language, 29 (1953)

For a bibliography of Lees's publications, see Sadock and Vanek 1970.

Bibliography

• Biber, D., and E. Finegan. 1991. "On the exploitation of computerized corpora in variation studies." In K. Aijmer and B. Altenberg (eds.), English corpus linguistics: Studies in honour of Jan Svartvik, 204-220. London: Longman.
• Jerrold M. Sadock; Anthony L. Vanek (1970), Studies Presented to Robert B. Lees by His Students, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Linguistic Research Inc.

See also

• Glottochronology

References

1. Biber and Finegan 1991

External links

• In Memoriam Robert B. Lees (linguist mailing list)
• Robert B. Lees: In Memoriam: Noam Chomsky, Kenneth Hale, Braj Kachru, Frederick Newmeyer, Arnold Zwicky and others remember Robert Lees.