Morris Halle

Morris Halle was a Latvian-American linguist born July 23, 1923, in Liepaja, Latvia, and died April 2, 2018, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was an Institute Professor and later professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, regarded as a founder of generative phonology and, alongside Noam Chomsky, of MIT modern linguistics department. He co-authored The Sound Pattern of English (1968) with Chomsky, developed the earliest theory of generative metrics with Samuel Jay Keyser, and later helped create the Distributed Morphology framework with Alec Marantz. Halle served as president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1974 and remained active in research after retiring from MIT in 1996.