The father of "modern phonology",[1] he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and The Sound Pattern of English in 1968 with Chomsky.

He also co-authored (with Samuel Jay Keyser) the earliest theory of generative metrics, and developed the Distributed Morphology framework with Alec Marantz.

[2] Halle was born - as Morris Pinkowitz (Latvian: Moriss Pinkovics) - on July 23, 1923, in Liepāja, Latvia.

He entered the United States Army in 1943 and was discharged in 1946, at which point he went to the University of Chicago, where he got his master's degree in linguistics in 1948.

He is considered to be, with Noam Chomsky, the founder of the modern linguistics department at MIT.