Robert Lees (Linguist) (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! 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. 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.