Biographical Memoirs Volume 89 (2007) / Chapter Skim
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CHARLES F. HOCKETT
CHARLES F. HOCKETT
Pages 150-179
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Photograph by Photo Services, Cornell University.
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Structuralist linguistics was sometimes referred to as Bloomfieldian linguistics from one of its pioneering figures, Leonard Bloomfield, who produced the seminal 1933 work Language. Hockett considered Bloomfield his master, and referred to his own influential 1958 work A Course in Modern Linguistics as "a commentary on Language." Hockett was considered by many to be the brightest young contributor to linguistic theory in the framework of structural linguistics, to which he contributed a number of basic concepts and issues.
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His paper on Potowatomi syntax was published in Language in that year (1939) , and the dissertation, in streamlined form, was published as a series in the International Journal of American Linguistics in 1948.
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After a short association with the American College Dictionary, he began his university teaching career in 1946, as an assistant professor of linguistics in the newly formed Division of Modern Languages at Cornell, a pioneering unit designed specifically to unite linguistics and language teaching on the university level following the model of the successful wartime effort. The division, which later morphed into the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics, was given the responsibility for basic language teaching for virtually all languages at Cornell, a function it retained in a widening number of languages until recently.
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Along with him were some of the leading names in structural linguistics, both descriptive and historical, including William Moulton, Robert Hall, Frederick Agard, and Gordon Fairbanks, all of whom directed and taught in language programs and carried out productive research and teaching in linguistics. Hockett once described the situation as "in effect, a linguistics institute in permanent session" that "permitted me to spend most of my time just as I have wanted to, in linguistics and anthropology alike"(1980, p.
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Like Bloomfield, Hockett was himself a master of linguistic description, producing numerous principled, meticulous, and perspicacious descriptions of an array of languages, including not only the Algonquian studies that he was most recognized for but also Chinese, Fijian, and English. American structural linguistics, consistent with its empirical orientation, always had a strong descriptive component.
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His directly theoretical productions were legion, and many of them were legendary, working their way into much of the work of structuralist linguists and becoming part of the conceptual equipment of several generations of students. The neo-Bloomfieldian structuralist linguistics of the 1940s and 1950s was developed by a number of productive linguists, including Bernard Bloch, George Trager, Henry Lee Smith, and Zellig Harris, but arguably Hockett was the single most productive and wide-ranging figure in the establishment of the parameters of the enterprise, and in discerning, defining, and elaborating issues that needed to be faced in that work.
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From page 157... ...
One result was the inclusion in A Manual of Phonology (1955) of an introductory section presenting a finite state, Markovian view of speech communication and grammar, essentially of the kind that Chomsky famously critiqued in Syntactic Structures (1957)
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Hockett's treatment of grammatical analysis, especially syntax, in A Course in Modern Linguistics is especially interesting, and hindsight endows it with an element of dramatic irony, since generative grammar was looming on the horizon. It was in that book that Hockett introduced his concept of "surface and deep grammar." It was a direct exemplification of his ability to perceive and isolate phenomena that had to be accounted for in any full account of language but that were at the time not amenable to or expressible in the canons of scientific linguistics to which he subscribed.
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that foreshadowed the ultimate dominance of generative grammar. Though neither Chomsky nor Lees appear in the index of the work or are treated in the text itself, they are listed in the bibliography, and there is a note at the end of one chapter that the transformational approach of Chomsky, Harris, and Lees came too late to be worked into the treatment (1958, p.
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In part, this shift was stimulated by work that he had done in the 1950s in a project with the psychiatrists Robert Pittenger and Jack Danehy that involved a number of other anthropologists, linguists, and kinesicists and produced a fine-grained analysis of the first five minutes of a psychiatric interview published in 1960. As he remarked is his 1977 preface to the reprinting of his 1960 paper "Ethnolinguistic
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. His proposals leading toward the new kind of linguistics that he suggested in the finale of his 1964 presidential address were already present in the 1960 paper "Ethnolinguistic Implications of [Recent]
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Its title reflected his intention to work further toward the formulation of a theory of hearing and speaking and redirect linguistic science to reexamine the nature of language in terms of how it operated in, and in fact was created within, the speaking-hearing-understanding situation. The book presented his thoughts and observations on many of what he saw to be the basic properties of language in action, and characteristically, it included not only some new proposals and insights but also proposed some unresolved questions.
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In his 1964 presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America, he went so far as to characterize Chomsky's Syntactic Structures as "one of only four major breakthroughs in the history of modern linguistics." In his 1964 Linguistic Institute lectures on mathematics and linguistics, he made a number of approving references to Chomsky's work, but by the time the work was published in 1966 he had added a footnote to the proof in the preface that those "conciliatory remarks" were the result of his "misunderstanding," and that "[while not passing] detailed judgment on Chomsky's frame of reference .
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Despite the heated and not infrequently personal rhetoric that marked the argument on both sides and his own sometimes intemperately expressed personal feelings (1977, p. 61; Mehta, 1971, pp.
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In the tradition of historical linguistics in which he worked, the three central mechanisms of change were sound change, analogy, and borrowing -- and analogy accompanied by editing -- had become the fundamental mechanism in his dynamic theory of language generation. Hockett's talents, scholarly interests, and productivity extended well beyond linguistics proper.
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His Ph.D. was in anthropology, and he never ceased to consider linguistics as a component of that field, that is, as "linguistics wrapped in anthropology" and as that branch of science devoted to the discovery of the place of human language in the universe.
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He began with seven features appearing in the 1958 textbook and in the 1959 paper "Animal ‘Languages' and Human Language." Those seven subsequently underwent numerous expansions and revisions, eventuating in 13 features as they appeared in his 1960 paper "Logical Considerations in the Study of Animal Communication" and the popularized version in Scientific American entitled "The Origin of Speech." These were part of a wider and more daring effort to determine the origin of human language -- a subject of inquiry that was far from popular when he undertook it, and which led to the much reprinted 1964 paper with Robert Ascher on the human revolution. Hockett's design features have not only found their way into linguistics texts but also have been crucially incorporated into work within the field of animal communication.
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. He included openness, aka creativity, as one of the basic design features of human language, but he also delighted in the actual creative use of language and the witty turns that it made possible -- in short, in having fun with it.
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She became a professor of mathematics at Ithaca College and the author of a halfdozen textbooks, typed by him, a collaboration that reinforced his own considerable capability in mathematics. They had five children: four girls (Alpha Hockett Walker, Amy Robin Rose, Rachel Hockett Youngman, and Carey Beth Hockett)
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Hockett Music Scholarship, the Shirley and Chas Hockett Chamber Music Concert Series, and the Hockett Family Recital Hall at Ithaca College. Fittingly, Hockett's memorial service was in great measure a concert at that institution that included several of his own compositions, some of them played by members of his family.
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However he changed his views, not least on his own work, he never wavered from his Bloomfieldian commitment to the idea that the only valid generalizations about language were empirical generalizations, and from a conviction that whatever hypotheses or theoretical leaps one might make it was an absolute requirement to be responsible to the observable data. In short, "Linguistics is either an empirical science or it is nonsense" (Chevillet, 1996, p.
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He would not infrequently pursue some line of investigation, and then reject, sometimes abruptly, the analysis that he had been developing as proving inadequate or not properly accounting for the facts. This could be disconcerting to those students who wanted to fill their notebooks with accepted truth, but to others it was exciting as the model of how a scientific investigator proceeds and of the difficulty of arriving at whatever truth there existed to be found.
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CHARLES F HOCKETT 173 presidential address to the Linguistic Society of America (1965, p.
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Harris, Methods in Structural Linguistics.
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New Haven: Yale University Press 1966. (No credit given in this version to the editors or other workers on the original military edition)
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1958 Eastern Ojibwa Grammar, Texts and Word Lists. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
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1970 A Leonard Bloomfield Anthology. Bloomington, IN.: Indiana Uni versity Press.
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178 BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIRS 1980 Preserving the heritage. In First Person Singular: Papers from the Conference on an Oral Archive for the History of American Lin guistics, eds.
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