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

Education

Lees went to the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

in 1956 to work on its

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

project. He first came to notice with an influential review of

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American public intellectual: a linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky i ...

's '' Syntactic Structures'' (1957) and with his 1960 book ''The Grammar of English Nominalizations''. Lees was later dismissed from his research position by

Victor Yngve Victor H. Yngve (July 5, 1920 – January 15, 2012W. John HutchinVictor Yngve obituary aclweb.org; accessed August 15, 2017.) was professor of linguistics at the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1953-1965). H ...

, as Lees had wanted to continue working on straight linguistics rather than on machine translation. He then enrolled in the electrical engineering department at MIT, from which he obtained his Ph.D. in linguistics under Chomsky.

Career

Lees was the first Head of the Department of Linguistics at the

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univers ...

, serving from 1965 to 1968. In 1969, Lees moved to

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

to teach at

Tel Aviv University Tel Aviv University (TAU) ( he, אוּנִיבֶרְסִיטַת תֵּל אָבִיב, ''Universitat Tel Aviv'') is a public research university in Tel Aviv, Israel. With over 30,000 students, it is the largest university in the country. Locate ...

, and he established the university's linguistics department in 1970. Lees also went to India on a tour under the patronization of the

Ford Foundation The Ford Foundation is an American private foundation with the stated goal of advancing human welfare. Created in 1936 by Edsel Ford and his father Henry Ford, it was originally funded by a US$25,000 gift from Edsel Ford. By 1947, after the death ...

. He taught intensive courses on contemporary linguistics at

Delhi University Delhi University (DU), formally the University of Delhi, is a collegiate central university located in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 1922 by an Act of the Central Legislative Assembly and is recognized as an Institute of Eminence (IoE) ...

and at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages in

Hyderabad Hyderabad ( ; , ) is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Telangana and the ''de jure'' capital of Andhra Pradesh. It occupies on the Deccan Plateau along the banks of the Musi River, in the northern part of Southern India ...

. 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 The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English (or just Brown Corpus) is an electronic collection of text samples of American English, the first major structured corpus of varied genres. This corpus first set the bar for the ...

: "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."Biber and Finegan 1991

Selected works

*''The Phonology of Modern Standard Turkish''. Routledge Curzan. *''English for Turks''. Spoken Language Serv 1981, *with Braj B. Kachru, Yacov Malkiel, Angelina Pietrangeli: ''Issues in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Henry and Renee Kahane''. University of Illinois Press 1974, *''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. *

References

External links

In Memoriam Robert B. Lees (linguist mailing list)Robert B. Lees: ''In Memoriam''

, Kenneth Hale,

Braj Kachru Braj Bihari Kachru (15 May 1932 – 29 July 2016) was an Indian-American linguist. He was Jubilee Professor of Linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He published studies on the Kashmiri language. Personal life Braj ...

Frederick Newmeyer Frederick J. (Fritz) Newmeyer (born January 30, 1944) is an American linguist who is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Washington and adjunct professor in the University of British Columbia Department of Linguistics and the ...