Halle Morris (born Morris Pinkowitz) (23 July 1923, Liepāja) — linguist.
In 1929 Morris Halle moved with his family to Riga, where he studied at a Hebrew gimnasium.
He emigrated to the United States in 1940.
From 1941 to 1943 he studied engineering at the City College of New York. From 1943 to 1946 he served in the army.
He then entered the University of Chicago, where he received a master’s degree in linguistics in 1948.
He continued advanced studies in linguistics at Columbia University under the supervision of the outstanding linguist Roman Jakobson. Together with Jakobson he published the study Fundamentals of Language in 1956, as well as Preliminaries to Speech Analysis in 1952, a work that became the basis for a universal classification of the sounds of natural language.
He became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, where during his early years he conducted research in speech acoustics and later specialized entirely in linguistics after the establishment of the linguistics program.
He defended his doctoral dissertation at Harvard University in 1955.
He was fluent in German, Yiddish, Latvian, Russian, Hebrew, and English.
In 1996 he retired from MIT while remaining an active researcher and author.
Halle is best known as the founder of the independent field of linguistics known as generative phonology.
The principal ideas of this new field were formulated and applied by Halle and his coauthors in the now-classic works:
• On Accent and Juncture in English (1956, with Noam Chomsky and F. Lukoff),
• The Sound Pattern of Russian (first published in the Netherlands in 1959),
• The Sound Pattern of English (1968, jointly with Noam Chomsky).
These works presented for the first time the transformational theory of phonology, extending Chomsky’s work on the formalization of grammar and proposing that the phonological component of language consists of a set of sounds/segments together with rules governing their transformations.
Halle authored dozens of articles and several books in the field of generative phonology.
Works: On Accent and Juncture in English. VGravenhage, 1956 (with N. Chomsky and F. Lukoff); The sound pattern of Russian: A linguistic and acoustical investigation. The Hague: Mouton, 1959; The Sound Pattern of English. New York, 1968 (with N. Chomsky); Problem Book in Phonology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982 (with G.N. Clemens); An Essay on Stress. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987 (with J.-R. Vergnaud); From Memory to Speech and Back. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003; Meter in Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008 (with N. Fabb).