Robert Lees

Robert B. Lees (9 July 1922 – 6 December 1996) was an American linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.

Education 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 with his 1960 book The Grammar of English Nominalizations. Lees was later dismissed from his research position by Victor Yngve, 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. Lees' role in fostering Chomskyan transformational generative grammar is discussed in Newmeyer (1986: 35-36).

Career Lees was the first Head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, serving from 1965 to 1968.

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.