Bernard Sterling Comrie, (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

Articles