Charles F. Hockett, one of the last great champions of structural linguistics, an approach to the study of language upstaged by the “Chomsky revolution” of the 1950s, has died.
Mr. Hockett, 84, died Nov. 3 in a medical center in Ithaca, N.Y.
Before his retirement in 1982, Mr. Hockett was a professor of anthropology and linguistics at Cornell University. His many books include “A Course in Modern Linguistics” (1955), which remained the standard introductory work for nearly two decades, and the anthropology text “Man’s Place in Nature” (1973).
Mr. Hockett, whose deliberate manner of speaking contributed to his professorial mien, was one of the most prominent linguists of the post-World War II era.
He was recognized for his meticulous analyses of languages from Chinese to Fijian to Potawatomi, a lifework he once described as “anthropology wrapped around linguistics.” He was later known for his stinging criticism of Chomskyan linguistics, which he called “a theory spawned by a generation of vipers.”
Until the late 1950s, structural linguistics held sway as the field’s reigning methodology. Closely allied with behavioral psychology, it viewed language as a social phenomenon and the linguist’s task as the compilation of minutely detailed grammatical inventories of individual languages.
But in 1957, young linguist Noam Chomsky redirected the course of the field from behavior to biology, arguing that human-language ability is the product of an innate, universal cognitive faculty.
The task of the linguist, then, should be to characterize this inborn faculty by means of abstract, quasi-mathematical rules. Chomsky’s work, originally known as transformational-generative grammar, continues to be the dominant force in linguistics.
Mr. Hockett, however, remained a lifelong adherent of structuralism, lamenting what he viewed as the Chomskyans’ ripping of language from its social context.
