Education
He received his training in classics from Columbia University, completing a Doctor of Philosophy there in 1941.
He received his training in classics from Columbia University, completing a Doctor of Philosophy there in 1941.
His best known works include Linguistic Speculations (Cambridge, 1971) and his contributions to Readings in Linguistics II (University of Chicago, 1966). Fred Walter Householder, Junior. was an American linguist at Indiana University at Bloomington, Indiana. Householder held joint appointments in the departments of classics and linguistics at Indiana University from 1948 to 1983, and chaired the Department of Linguistics from 1974 to 1980.
Householder received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1958, teaching at London University 1958-1959.
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. He was elected Vice President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1980, and President of the Local Search Association in 1981.
Householder specialized in the study and theory of syntax, in languages from Greek and Latin to Chinese and Azerbaijani. In 1965, the first issue of the Journal of Linguistics published Householder"s criticism of the work of Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, challenging their work on phonology, in particular their methodology.
He retired in 1983, and after his death, Indiana University established the Householder Memorial Fund to provide scholarships to students specializing in Kurdish linguistics, one of the focuses of his research.
Chomsky and Halle responded in the second issue, defending their work on the potential for phonology to unlock universal meanings in sound and speech.