Charles F. Hockett

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Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 - November 3, 2000) was an important American linguistic theorist who developed many influential ideas of American structuralism, and a student of Leonard Bloomfield.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, he received a joint B.A. and M.A. from Ohio State University in 1936. In 1939, he received his doctorate from Yale University.

He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism: distributionalism or taxonomic structuralism. In his "Note on Structure" he argues that linguistics can be seen as a game and as a science. A linguist as player has a freedom for experimentation on all the utterances of a language, but no criterion to compare his analysis with other linguists'. A linguist as scientist classifies given utterances and is able not only to analyze, but also to predict other utterances of a language. The accuracy of such a prediction allows to judge about the merits of the analysis.

Famous quote 'Languages differ not so much as to what can be said in them, but rather as to what is relatively easy to say in them'

[edit] Works

1947: "Peiping phonology", in: Journal of the American Oriental Society, 67, pp. 253-267. [= Martin Joos (ed.), Readings in Linguistics, vol. I, 4th edition. Chicago and London 1966, pp. 217-228].
1947: "Problems of morphemic analysis", in: Language, 24, pp. 414-41. [= Readings in Linguistics, vol. I, pp. 229-242].
1948: "Biophysics, linguistics, and the unity of science", in: American Scientist, 36, pp. 558-572.
1950: "Peiping morphophonemics", in: Language, 26, pp. 63-85. [= Readings in Linguistics, vol. I, pp. 315-328].
1954: "Two models of grammatical description", in: Word, 10, pp. 210-234. [= Readings in Linguistics, vol. I, pp. 386-399].
1955: A Manual of Phonology. Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics 11.
1958: A Course in Modern Linguistics. The Macmillan Company: New York.
1960: "The Origin of Speech". in "Scientific American", 203, pp.89-97.

[edit] References

Gair, James W. 2003. [Obituary] Charles F. Hockett. Language. 79:600-613.
Falk, Julia S. 2003. "Turn to the history of linguistics : Noam Chomsky and Charles Hockett in the 1960s". Historiographia linguistica (international journal for the history of the language sciences) 30/1-2, pp. 129-185. [1]

[edit] External links

Old Professor Hockett: A poem written in honor of Professor Hockett by one of his students during his 1991 visit to Rice University.
Linguist List: Obituary of Charles Hockett from the New York Times (November 13, 2000), reproduced on the Linguist List. The NY Times link to the obituary is at NY Times