Morris Halle

Life and career

Halle was born on July 23, 1923, in Liepāja, Latvia, as Morris Pinkowitz (Latvian: Moriss Pinkovics). In 1929, he moved with his Jewish family to Riga. He arrived in the United States in 1940 and graduated from George Washington High School. 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 PhD from Harvard University in 1955. He is considered to be, with Noam Chomsky, the founder of the modern linguistics department at MIT. He retired from MIT in 1996, but he remained active in research and publication. He was fluent in German, Yiddish, Latvian, Russian, Hebrew and English.

Halle was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1960. He was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1974. He was also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Halle was married for fifty-six years to painter, artist and activist Rosamond Thaxter Halle (née Strong), until her death in April 2011. They had three sons: David, John and Timothy.

Halle resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He died on April 2, 2018, at the age of 94.