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CHARLES F. HOCKETT

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 analize, but also to predict other utterances of a language. The accuracy of such a prediction allows to judge about the merits of the analysis.

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 Amercian", 203, pp.89-97.

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]

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.
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