James Wesley “Jim” Harris PhD ’67, professor emeritus of Spanish and linguistics, handed away on Nov. 10. He was 92.
Harris attended the College of Georgia, the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He later earned a grasp’s diploma in linguistics from Louisiana State College and a PhD in linguistics from MIT.
Harris joined the MIT college as an assistant professor in 1967, the place he remained till his retirement in 1996. Throughout his tenure, he served as head of what was then referred to as the Division of Overseas Languages and Literatures.
“I met Jim once I got here to MIT in 1977 as division head of the neonatal Division of Linguistics and Philosophy,” says Samuel Jay Keyser, MIT professor emeritus of linguistics. “All through his profession within the division, he by no means relinquished his connection to the unit that first employed him at MIT.”
In his early days at MIT, when French, German, and Russian dominated as elite “languages of science and world literature,” Harris championed, over some opposition, the introduction of Spanish language and literature programs.
He later oversaw the inclusion of Japanese and Chinese language programs as language choices at MIT. He promoted undergraduate programs in linguistics, resulting in a full undergraduate diploma program and later broadening the main target of the celebrated PhD program.
His analysis in linguistics centered on theoretical phonology and morphology. His books, shows at skilled conferences, and articles in peer-reviewed journals had been among the many most mentioned — in each constructive and unfavorable assessments, as he famous — by outstanding students within the area. The flexibility to show complicated technical materials comfortably in Spanish, plus the standing of an MIT professorship, resulted in invites to show at universities throughout Spain and Latin America. He was additionally extremely valued as a member of the editorial boards of a number of skilled journals.
“I keep in mind Jim most of all for being the consummate scholar,” Keyser says. “His articles had been fashions of argumentation. They had been assembled with all of the precision of an Inca wall and all the fantastic thing about a Faberge Egg. You couldn’t slip a bank card by means of any of its arguments, they had been so fantastically sculpted.”
Having achieved nationwide recognition as an English-Spanish bilingual trainer and teacher-trainer, Harris was engaged as a author on the Trendy Language Supplies Improvement Middle in New York. Later, he co-authored, with Guillermo Segreda, a collection of well-liked college-level Spanish textbooks.
“Harris belonged to Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle’s first technology of graduate college students,” says MIT linguist Michael John Kenstowicz. “Collectively they overturned the distributionalist mannequin of the structuralists in favor of ordered generative guidelines.”
After retiring from MIT, he remained internationally acknowledged as a extremely influential determine within the space of Romance linguistics, and “el decano” (“the dean”) of Spanish phonology.
Harris was married to Florence Warshawsky Harris for 50 years till her passing in 2020. In 2011, in celebration of this system’s fiftieth anniversary, they partnered to arrange and publish a detailed historical past of the linguistics program’s origins. Warshawsky Harris, previously an MIT graduate pupil, additionally edited Chomsky and Halle’s influential “The Sound Sample on English” and quite a few different essential linguistic texts.
Harris’ scholarship was widely known in a various group of scholarly articles and textbooks he authored, co-authored, edited, and printed.
Harris was born exterior Atlanta, Georgia, in 1932. Through the Korean Conflict, he carried out his navy service because the clarinet and saxophone teacher on the U.S. Naval Faculty of Music in Washington. After his discharge, he directed the band on the Charlotte Corridor Faculty in Maryland, the place he additionally taught Spanish, French, and Latin.
Harris is survived by his daughter, Lynn Corinne Harris, his son-in-law, Rabbi David Adelson, and his grandchildren, Bee Adelson and Sam Harris.
