Charles F. Hockett

Charles Francis Hockett (January 17, 1916 – November 3, 2000) was an American linguist who developed many influential ideas in American structuralist linguistics.

He represents the post-Bloomfieldian phase of structuralism often referred to as "distributionalism" or "taxonomic structuralism".

His academic career spanned over half a century at Cornell and Rice universities.

Hockett was also a firm believer of linguistics as a branch of anthropology, making contributions that were significant to the field of anthropology as well.

At the age of 16, Hockett enrolled at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio where he received a Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts in ancient history.

While enrolled at Ohio State, Hockett became interested in the work of Leonard Bloomfield, a leading figure in the field of structural linguistics.

Hockett continued his education at Yale University where he studied anthropology and linguistics and received his PhD in anthropology in 1939.

While studying at Yale, Hockett studied with several other influential linguists such as Edward Sapir, George P. Murdock, and Benjamin Whorf.

Hockett's dissertation was based on his fieldwork in Potawatomi; his paper on Potawatomi syntax was published in Language in 1939.

Hockett began his teaching career in 1946 as an assistant professor of linguistics in the Division of Modern Languages at Cornell University where he was responsible for directing the Chinese language program.

In 1948 his dissertation was published as a series in the International Journal of American Linguistics.

Following fieldwork in Kickapoo and Michoacán, Mexico, Hockett did two years of postdoctoral study with Leonard Bloomfield in Chicago and Michigan.

In 1957, Hockett became a member of Cornell's anthropology department and continued to teach anthropology and linguistics until he retired to emeritus status in 1982.

Hockett was initially receptive to Generative grammar, hailing Chomsky's Syntactic Structures as "one of only four major breakthroughs in the history of modern linguistics" (1965).

After carefully examining the generative school's proposed innovations in Linguistics, Hockett decided that this approach was of little value.

His book The State of the Art outlined his criticisms of the generative approach.

In his paraphrase a key principle of the Chomskyan paradigm is that there are an infinite number of grammatical sentences in any particular language.

"The grammar of a language is a finite system that characterizes an infinite set of (well-formed) sentences. More specifically, the grammar of a language is a well-defined system by definition not more powerful than a universal Turing machine (and, in fact, surely a great deal weaker)."

The crux of Hockett's rebuttal is that the set of grammatical sentences in a language is not infinite, but rather ill-defined.

Hockett proposes that "no physical system is well-defined".

Later in "Where the tongue slips, there slip I" he writes as follows.

It is currently fashionable to assume that, underlying the actual more or less bumbling speech behavior of any human being, there is a subtle and complicated but determinate linguistic "competence": a sentence-generating device whose design can only be roughly guessed at by any techniques so far available to us.

This point of view makes linguistics very hard and very erudite, so that anyone who actually does discover facts about underlying "competence" is entitled to considerable kudos.

Within this popular frame of reference, a theory of "performance" -- of the "generation of speech" -- must take more or less the following form.

If a sentence is to be uttered aloud, or even thought silently to oneself, it must first be built by the internal "competence" of the speaker, the functioning of which is by definition such that the sentence will be legal ("grammatical") in every respect.

But that is not enough; the sentence as thus constructed must then be performed, either overtly so that others may hear it, or covertly so that it is perceived only by the speaker himself.

It is in this second step that blunders may appear.

That which is generated by the speaker's internal "competence"is what the speaker "intends to say," and is the only real concern of linguistics: blunders in actually performed speech are instructions from elsewhere.

Just if there are no such intrusions is what is performed an instance of "smooth speech".

In 1986, he took up an adjunct post at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where he remained active until his death in 2000.

Charles Hockett held membership among many academic institutions such as the National Academy of Sciences the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

He served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States.

In addition to making many contributions to the field of structural linguistics, Hockett also considered such things as Whorfian Theory, jokes, the nature of writing systems, slips of the tongue, and animal communication and their relativeness to speech.

Outside the realm of linguistics and anthropology, Hockett practiced musical performance and composition.

Hockett composed a full-length opera called The Love of Doña Rosita which was based on a play by Federico García Lorca and premiered at Ithaca College by the Ithaca Opera.

Hockett and his wife Shirley were vital leaders in the development of the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra in Ithaca, New York.

In appreciation of the Hocketts' hard work and dedication to the Ithaca community, Ithaca College established the Charles F. Hockett Music Scholarship, the Shirley and Chas Hockett Chamber Music Concert Series, and the Hockett Family Recital Hall.

In his paper "A Note on Structure", he proposes that linguistics can be seen as "a game and as a science."

A linguist as a player in the game of languages has the freedom to experiment on all utterances of a language, but must ensure that "all the utterances of the corpus must be taken into account."

Late in his career, he was known for his stinging criticism of Chomskyan linguistics.