Morris Halle - Biography

Morris Halle (Latvian: Moriss Pinkovics; born Morris Pinkowitz; July 23, 1923), is a Latvian-American Jewish linguist and an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is 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.

Halle was born in Liepāja, Latvia, in 1923, and moved with his family to Riga in 1929. They arrived in the United States in 1940. From 1941 to 1943, he 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.

Halle was married for fifty six years to noted artist Rosamond Thaxter Strong Halle until her death in April of 2011. He has three sons, David, John and Timothy.

Halle currently resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

External links

• Halle page at MIT
• MIT News Office article about Halle