Hall was an early promoter of the linguistics of Creole languages, and published broadly within the field. Under the auspices of the United States Armed Services Institute, he wrote a structuralist description of Melanesian Pidgin English in 1943.[1] Among other creoles and pidgin languages, he studied Sranan of Surinam and Haitian Creole.
Hall organized the successful spoken language learning method for soldiers in the Second World War.
Hall criticized Basic English because it encouraged the use of multi-meaning words (such as get) under the guise of simplicity.
Hall was an outspoken critic of the generative tradition of linguistics emanating from Noam Chomsky, for example remarking that "Chomskyan transformationalism rejects a scientific approach for an anti-scientific one."[3]
Notable works
An Analytical Grammar of the Hungarian Language (1938)
The Kensington Rune-Stone Authentic and Important (1994)
References
^Holm, John A. (2000). An introduction to pidgins and creoles. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN0-521-58581-3.
^Marchand, James W. (1983) "Review of Hall, Robert A. Jr.: The Kensington Rune-Stone is Genuine 1982." in Studies in Language 7:2 (Summer, 1983):305-313. doi:10.1075/sl.7.2.10mar
^American Linguistics: 1925-1969. Three essays with a Preface to the Reprint. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (1976), p. 91
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