Bernard Sterling Comrie | |
---|---|
Born | 23 May 1947 United Kingdom |
Nationality | British |
Occupation | Linguist |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
Academic work | |
Institutions | University of California, Santa Barbara |
Main interests | Linguistic typology and linguistic universals |
Bernard Sterling Comrie, FBA (/ˈbɜːrnərd ˈkɒmriː/; 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, where he also taught Russian and Linguistics until he moved to the Linguistics Department of the University of Southern California.
Personal life
He married linguistics professor Akiko Kumahira in 1985.
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.
Honours
Comrie was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences. He became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. In September 2017, he was awarded the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics by the British Academy.
Selected works
Books
- The World's Major Languages (ed.), 1987, New York: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-520521-9. Second edition: 2009, Routledge ISBN 978-0-415-35339-7.
- Tense, 1985, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139165815.
- The Languages of the Soviet Union, 1981, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Language Surveys), ISBN 0-521-23230-9 (hard covers) and ISBN 0-521-29877-6 (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.
References
- "Bernard Comrie (Q705700)". Wikidata. Retrieved 30 October 2021.
- "Bernard Comrie - Curriculum Vitae" (PDF). Max Planck Institute. Retrieved 21 November 2015.
- "Professor Bernard Comrie FBA". The British Academy. Retrieved 28 February 2022.
- "Bernard Comrie | Department of Linguistics - UC Santa Barbara". www.linguistics.ucsb.edu.
- State of California. Marriage Index, 1960-1985. Center for Health Statistics, California Department of Health Services, Sacramento, California.
- "Akiko Comrie". Loyola Marymount University. Archived from the original on 22 November 2015. Retrieved 21 November 2015.
- "Bernard Comrie". University of California, Santa Barbara. Retrieved 21 November 2015.
- "Professor Bernard Comrie". The British Academy. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
- "B.S. Comrie". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 29 January 2016. Retrieved 29 January 2016.
- "Prize and medal winners 2017". The British Academy. Retrieved 15 October 2017.
External links
Categories:- 1947 births
- Living people
- University of California, Santa Barbara faculty
- Alumni of the University of Cambridge
- People from Sunderland
- Members of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences
- Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
- Historical linguists
- Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society
- Recipients of the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics
- Corresponding fellows of the British Academy
- Linguists of Papuan languages
- Linguists of Piawi languages
- Linguists of Caucasian languages
- 20th-century British linguists
- 21st-century linguists
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
- Max Planck Institute directors
- Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America
- Typologists