Bernard Comrie Explained

Bernard Sterling Comrie
Birth Date:	23 May 1947
Birth Place:	United Kingdom
Nationality:	British
Occupation:	Linguist
Alma Mater:	University of Cambridge
Workplaces:	University of California, Santa Barbara
Main Interests:	Linguistic typology and linguistic universals

Bernard Sterling Comrie,^[1] (; born 23 May 1947) is a British-born linguist. Comrie is a specialist in linguistic typology, linguistic universals and on Caucasian languages.

Personal life

Early life and education

Comrie was born in Sunderland, England on 23 May 1947. He earned his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics from the University of Cambridge,^{[2] [3]} where he also taught Russian and Linguistics until he moved to the Linguistics Department of the University of Southern California.^[4]

Personal life

He married linguistics professor Akiko Kumahira in 1985.^{[5] [6]}

Professional life

Academic career

For 17 years he was professor at and director of the former Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, combined with a post as Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he returned full-time from 1 June 2015. He has also taught at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles.^[7]

Honours

Comrie was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.^[8] He became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.^[9] In September 2017, he was awarded the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics by the British Academy.^[10]

Selected works

Books

• The World's Major Languages (ed.), 1987, New York: Oxford University Press, . Second edition: 2009, Routledge .
• Tense, 1985, Cambridge University Press. .
• The Languages of the Soviet Union, 1981, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Language Surveys), (hard covers) and (paperback)
• Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology, 1981, The University of Chicago Press.
• Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems, 1976, Cambridge University Press.

Articles

• Comrie, Bernard. 1975. Causatives and universal grammar. Transactions of the Philological Society 1974. 1–32.
• Comrie, Bernard. 1976. The syntax of causative constructions: Cross-language similarities and divergences. In Shibatani, Masayoshi (ed.), Syntax and Semantics 6: The Grammar of Causative Constructions, 261–312. New York: Academic Press.
• Comrie, Bernard. 1978. Ergativity. In Lehmann, Winfred P. (ed.), Syntactic typology: Studies in the phenomenology of language, 329–394. Austin: University of Texas Press.
• Comrie, Bernard. 1986. Markedness, grammar, people, and the world. In Eckman, Fred R. & Moravcsik, Edith A. & Wirth, Jessica R. (eds.), Markedness, 85–106. New York: Plenum.
• Comrie, Bernard. 1999. Reference-tracking: Description and explanation. Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung 52(3–4). 335–346.
• Comrie, Bernard. 2005. Alignment of case marking. In Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew S. & Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.), The world atlas of language structures, 398–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ((http://wals.info/chapter/98))
• Keenan, Edward L. & Comrie, Bernard. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8. 63–99.

External links

• Homepage at the Max Planck Institute

Notes and References

1. Web site: Bernard Comrie (Q705700) . Wikidata. 2021-10-30.
2. Web site: Bernard Comrie - Curriculum Vitae . Max Planck Institute . 2015-11-21.
3. Web site: Professor Bernard Comrie FBA . The British Academy . 28 February 2022 . en.
4. Web site: Bernard Comrie Department of Linguistics - UC Santa Barbara . www.linguistics.ucsb.edu . en.
5. State of California. Marriage Index, 1960-1985. Center for Health Statistics, California Department of Health Services, Sacramento, California.
6. Web site: Akiko Comrie . dead . https://web.archive.org/web/20151122135931/http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/modernlanguages/faculty/comrieakiko/ . 2015-11-22 . 2015-11-21 . Loyola Marymount University.
7. Web site: Bernard Comrie. 2015-11-21. University of California, Santa Barbara.
8. Web site: Professor Bernard Comrie. The British Academy. 15 October 2017.
9. Web site: B.S. Comrie . https://web.archive.org/web/20160129201450/https://www.knaw.nl/en/members/foreign-members/3992 . Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences . 29 January 2016 . 29 January 2016.
10. Web site: Prize and medal winners 2017. The British Academy. 15 October 2017.