Information AboutKen Hale |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT KENNETH L. HALE | |
| 1934 births | |
| hale, kenneth | |
| 2001 deaths | |
| american linguists | |
| syntacticians | |
| american polyglots | |
| SHOPPER'S DELIGHT | |
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Kenneth Locke Hale ( 1934 -- 2001 ) was a Linguist at MIT , who studied the syntax, lexicon and phonology of a huge variety of unstudied and often endangered languages -- especially indigenous languages of North America, Central America and Australia. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo , Tohono O'odham , Warlpiri , and Ulwa , among many others. In each language that he studied, Hale took care to educate native speakers in linguistics so that native speakers could participate in the study of that language. Among his students are the Tohono O'odham linguist Ofelia Zepeda and the Navajo linguists Paul Platero and Elavina Tsosie Perkins . Hale taught every summer in the Navajo Language Academy summer school, even in 2001 during his final illness. Among his major contributions to linguistic theory was the hypothesis that certain languages were Non-configurational , lacking the phrase structure characteristic of such languages as English. Non-configurational languages, according to Hale, display a set of properties that cluster together, including free word order, unpronounced pronouns and the ability to disperse semantically related words across a sentence. Much of his research in the last two decades of the twentieth century was devoted to the development of syntactic models that could explain why these properties cluster. Hale's ideas initiated an important research program, still pursued by many contemporary linguists. Hale championed the importance of under-studied minority languages in linguistic study, stating that a variety of linguistic phenomena would never have been discovered if only the major world languages had been studied. Any language, whether it has a hundred million native speakers or only ten, is equally likely to yield linguistic insight. Hale was also known as a polyglot who retained the ability to learn new languages with extraordinary rapidity and perfection throughout his life. As a child he learned English, Spanish, and Tohono O'odham. He learned Jemez and Hopi from his highschool roommates and Navajo from his roommate at the University of Arizona. He became so fluent in Warlpiri that he brought up his sons Ezra and Caleb to speak Warlpiri after his return from Australia to the United States. Ezra delivered his eulogy for his father in Warlpiri. Hale's reputation transcends his scholarly work. He was known as a champion of the speakers of minority languages, not just of their languages, as a result of which Noam Chomsky called him "a voice for the voiceless". Students and colleagues knew him as a man of enormous integrity and modesty. Hale was a beloved teacher who introduced many advanced students to the techniques of fieldwork and linguistic analysis, and who conveyed his love of language to all who met him. EARLY LIFE, EDUCATION AND EMPLOYMENT Kenneth Locke Hale was born on 15 August 1934 in Evanston, Illinois. When he was six his family moved to a ranch near Canelo in southern Arizona. He was a student at the University of Arizona from 1952 and obtained his PhD from the University Of Indiana , Bloomington, in 1959 (thesis ‘A Papago grammar’). He taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana, in 1961-63 and at the University Of Arizona , Tucson , in 1963-66. From 1967 he held a sequence of appointments at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology until his retirement in 1999. EXTERNAL LINKS REFERENCES
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