Education

Lees went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 in 1956 to work on its machine translation

Machine translation

Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates the use of computer software to translate text or speech from one natural language to another.On a basic...

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

Noam Chomsky

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...

's Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures is an seminal book in linguistics by American linguist Noam Chomsky, first published in 1957. It laid the foundation of Chomsky's idea of transformational grammar...

(1957), and his 1960 book The Grammar of English Nominalizations. Lees was later dismissed by Victor Yngve

Victor Yngve

Victor Yngve is professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of Chicago. He was one of the earliest researchers in computational linguistics and natural language processing, the use of computers to analyze and process languages...

 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.

Career

Lees was the first Head of the Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign is a large public research-intensive university in the state of Illinois, United States. It is the flagship campus of the University of Illinois system...

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

Israel

The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...

 at the Tel Aviv University

Tel Aviv University

Tel Aviv University is a public university located in Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel. With nearly 30,000 students, TAU is Israel's largest university.-History:...

 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

Ford Foundation

The Ford Foundation is a private foundation incorporated in Michigan and based in New York City created to fund programs that were chartered in 1936 by Edsel Ford and Henry Ford....

. 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

Brown Corpus

The Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-Day American English was compiled in the 1960s by Henry Kucera and W. Nelson Francis at Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island as a general corpus in the field of corpus linguistics...

: "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."

Selected works

• The Phonology of Modern Standard Turkish. Routledge Curzan. ISBN 978-0700708062
• English for Turks. Spoken Language Serv 1981, ISBN 978-0879506148
• 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 978-0252002465
• The Grammar of English Nominalizations
• The Basis of Glottochronology. Language, 29 (1953)

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

External links

• In Memoriam Robert B. Lees (linguist mailing list)
• Robert B. Lees: In Memoriam: Noam Chomsky
  Noam Chomsky
  Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
  
  , Kenneth Hale, Braj Kachru, Frederick Newmeyer
  Frederick Newmeyer
  Frederick J. Newmeyer is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the University of Washington and adjunct professor in the University of British Columbia Department of Linguistics and the Simon Fraser University Department of Linguistics...
  
  , Arnold Zwicky
  Arnold Zwicky
  Arnold M. Zwicky is a perennial Visiting Professor of linguistics at Stanford University, and Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of linguistics at the Ohio State University....
  
  and others remember Robert Lees.