'Morris Halle', né Pinkowitz, is an American
linguist. He was born in
Liepaja,
Latvia, in
1923, and moved with his family to
Riga in
1929. They arrived in the United States in
1940.
From
1941 to
1943, Halle studied engineering at the
City College of New York. He entered the
United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in
1946, at which point he went to the
University of Chicago, where he got his
master's degree in linguistics in
1948. He then studied at
Columbia University under
Roman Jakobson, became a professor at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in
1951, and earned his
Ph.D. from
Harvard University in
1955. He retired from MIT in
1996, but he remains active in research and publication. He is fluent in
German,
Yiddish,
Latvian,
Russian,
Hebrew and
English. He lives with his wife Rosamond in
Cambridge, Massachusetts.He has three sons, David, John and Timothy, all of whom are married. David is a primary school teacher with one daughter, Kelly, John taught music at Yale and now teaches at Bard College as does his wife, and they have one son; Timothy has one daughter.
Halle is likely best known for his pioneering work in generative
phonology, having written "On accent and juncture in English" in
1956 with
Noam Chomsky and
Fred Lukoff and ''
The Sound Pattern of English'' in
1968 with Chomsky.
External links
★
Halle page at MIT