Robert Lees (linguist)
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Robert B. Lees (1922-1996) 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 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."
