Bernard Comrie

{{Infobox academic

| name = Bernard Sterling Comrie

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| birth_date = 23 May 1947

| birth_place = United Kingdom

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| nationality = British

| occupation = Linguist

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| alma_mater = University of Cambridge

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| workplaces = University of California, Santa Barbara

| main_interests = Linguistic typology and linguistic universals

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Bernard Sterling Comrie,{{Cite web |url=https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q705700 |title=Bernard Comrie (Q705700)

|publisher= Wikidata|access-date=2021-10-30}} {{Post-nominals|country=GBR|size=100%|FBA}} ({{IPAc-en|ˈ|b|ɜr|n|ər|d|_|ˈ|k|ɒ|m|r|iː}}; born 23 May 1947) is a British 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,{{Cite web |url= http://www.eva.mpg.de/fileadmin/content_files/staff/comrie2/pdf/Comrie_CV.pdf |title=Bernard Comrie - Curriculum Vitae |publisher=Max Planck Institute |access-date=2015-11-21}}{{cite web |title=Professor Bernard Comrie FBA |url=https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/fellows/bernard-comrie-FBA/ |website=The British Academy |access-date=28 February 2022 |language=en}} where he also taught Russian and Linguistics until he moved to the Linguistics Department of the University of Southern California.{{cite web |title=Bernard Comrie {{!}} Department of Linguistics - UC Santa Barbara |url=https://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/people/bernard-comrie |website=www.linguistics.ucsb.edu |language=en}}

= Personal life =

He married linguistics professor Akiko Kumahira in 1985.State of California. Marriage Index, 1960-1985. Center for Health Statistics, California Department of Health Services, Sacramento, California.{{cite web |title=Akiko Comrie |url=http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/modernlanguages/faculty/comrieakiko/ |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151122135931/http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/modernlanguages/faculty/comrieakiko/ |archive-date=2015-11-22 |access-date=2015-11-21 |publisher=Loyola Marymount University}}

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.{{cite web|url=http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/people/bernard-comrie|title=Bernard Comrie|access-date=2015-11-21|publisher= University of California, Santa Barbara}}

= Honours =

Comrie was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.{{cite web|title=Professor Bernard Comrie|url=https://www.britac.ac.uk/users/professor-bernard-comrie|website=The British Academy|access-date=15 October 2017}} He became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000.{{cite web|url=https://www.knaw.nl/en/members/foreign-members/3992 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160129201450/https://www.knaw.nl/en/members/foreign-members/3992 |title=B.S. Comrie |publisher=Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences |archive-date=29 January 2016 |access-date=29 January 2016}} In September 2017, he was awarded the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics by the British Academy.{{cite web|title=Prize and medal winners 2017|url=https://www.britac.ac.uk/prize-and-medal-winners-2017|website=The British Academy|access-date=15 October 2017}}

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. [https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/lrc/resources/books/typology/7-ergativity.php 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. [https://zenodo.org/record/3903178 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.