Morris Halle

Morris Halle was Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The main focus of his research concerned phonology, broadly conceived, from the acoustic and articulatory properties of speech to the theoretical bases of the field. A significant portion of this work was devoted to the study of phonetic universals (the features), the nature of rules, and the prosodic structures underlying stress and accentuation. The results of these theoretical studies were illustrated and defended in detailed accounts of the phonologies of various languages, in particular, of English and of Russian, and in reconstruction of the accentual system of the IE proto-language. He also contributed to the development of the theory of distributed morphology, and to the elucidation of the nature of metrical verse.