Kenneth L. Hale
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, he took care to educate native speakers in linguistic concepts, so that the study of that language could be taken over by native speakers. Among his students are the Tohono O'odham linguist Ofelia Zepeda. 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 understudied, 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 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.
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