Robert Lees (linguist)

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

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.

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."

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

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