Kenneth L. Hale

Kenneth L. Hale
Born	(1934-08-15)August 15, 1934 Evanston, Illinois, U.S.
Died	October 8, 2001(2001-10-08) (aged 67) Lexington, Massachusetts, U.S.
Academic background
Education	University of Arizona (B.A.) Indiana University Bloomington (M.A., Ph.D.)
Thesis	A Papago Grammar (1959)
Doctoral advisor	Charles F. Voegelin
Academic work
Discipline	Linguist
Institutions	University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (1961–64) University of Alberta (1964) University of Arizona (1964–66) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1967–99)
Doctoral students	Andrew Carnie, LaVerne Jeanne, David Nash, Paul Platero, Rudolf de Rijk, Tova Rapoport, Peggy Speas, Richard Sproat
Website	linguistics.mit.edu/hale

Kenneth Locke Hale (August 15, 1934 – October 8, 2001), also known as Ken Hale, was an American linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studied a huge variety of previously unstudied and often endangered languages—especially indigenous languages of North America and Australia. Languages investigated by Hale include Navajo, O'odham, Warlpiri, and Ulwa.

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.