Charles F. Hockett
From Free net encyclopedia
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: the 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.
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.Template:US-academic-bio-stub