Zellig Sabbettai Harris was a renowned American linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, mathematical syntactician, and methodologist of science. Originally a Semiticist

Semitic languages

The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...

, he is best known for his work in structural linguistics and discourse analysis

Discourse analysis

Discourse analysis , or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event....

 and for the discovery of transformational structure in language. These developments from the first 10 years of his career were published within the first 25. His contributions in the subsequent 35 years of his career include transfer grammar, string analysis (adjunction grammar), elementary sentence-differences (and decomposition lattices), algebraic structures in language, operator grammar

Operator Grammar

Operator Grammar is a mathematical theory of human language that explains how language carries information. This theory is the culmination of the life work of Zellig Harris, with major publications toward the end of the last century...

, sublanguage grammar, and a theory of linguistic information.
Harris received his bachelor's

Bachelor's degree

A bachelor's degree is usually an academic degree awarded for an undergraduate course or major that generally lasts for three or four years, but can range anywhere from two to six years depending on the region of the world...

 (1930), master's

Master's degree

A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

 (1932), and doctoral (1934) degrees in the Oriental Studies department of the University of Pennsylvania

University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...

.