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2004 - Professor
Bernard Comrie
Citation for award of Degree of Doctor
of Letters (honoris causa)
Bernard Comrie is one of the top two or three leading scholars in functional
linguistics in the world today. He is currently Director at the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and, simultaneously,
Research Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He
is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Saxon
Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and past President of the Association for Linguistic
Typology.
His textbooks on grammatical topics are widely respected, used and referred
to. Bernard Comrie's Aspect: an introduction to the study of verbal aspect
and related problems was published by Cambridge University Press in 1976;
it has been reprinted eight times, and translated into Japanese and Korean.
His Language universals and linguistic typology was published by Blackwell
and the University of Chicago Press in 1981, with a second edition in
1989; this work has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Chinese, and
Japanese. His general treatise on Tense was published by Cambridge University
Press in 1985.
Besides these works, Bernard Comrie has made manifold contributions to
linguistic theory. His study (jointly with Edward Keenan) on 'Noun phrase
accessibility and universal grammar', published in 1977, set forth the
paradigm for investigation of relative clause constructions, with a hierarchy
predicting the relativisability of functional slots. His several papers
on causatives set forth a seminal set of parameters which stood unchallenged
for more than two decades.
His extended essay on 'Ergativity' was one of the foundation stones upon
which study of this grammatical phenomenon has been founded. He has, in
addition, made significant contributions to knowledge in relation to subjects,
voice, reflexives, negation, modality, evidentiality, switch-reference,
conditionals, conjunction, nominalisations, datives, numeral systems,
markedness, and the unit word.
Bernard Comrie was born in Sunderland in 1947 and brought up in Jamaica
and England. At the University of Cambridge he specialised in Russian
and studied in what was then called Leningrad. He is a leading expert
on Russian and on other Slavic languages, being co-author of The Russian
language since the revolution (1978) and The Russian language in the twentieth
century (1996). He also wrote, for the Cambridge Language Survey series,
The languages of the Soviet Union (1981), outlining the main features
of Turkic, Mongolian, Tungusic, Uralic, Indo-European, Caucasian and Paleo-Siberian
languages.
When in Leningrad, Bernard Comrie worked with speakers of Chukchee and
other minority languages of the old Soviet Union. He later undertook extensive
fieldwork in Papua New Guinea on Haruai, and most recently he has done
field work on Tsez, from the north-east Caucasian family. Other languages
on which he has published include Finnish, Tatar, Turkish, Basque, German,
Dutch, Polish, Macedonian, Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, Hindi, Armenian,
Yiddish, Maltese, Arabic, Yukaghir, Kamchadal, Ket, Gokana, Huichol, Piaiwi,
Khmer, Malayalam, and Kalaw Lagaw Ya, the language of the Western Torres
Strait.
Bernard Comrie not only does high-quality linguistics, he organises other
scholars to do the same. In 1977, he initiated the Lingua Descriptive
Series of grammars (later taken over by Croom Helm and then by Routledge).
Over the next 24 years, no less than 36 volumes appeared in this series,
each carefully overseen by Bernard. They included languages from every
continent.
Among the ten other volumes he has edited, The World's Major Languages
(1025 pages, 1987) focuses on over fifty languages and languages families.
This is the first place to which one goes, when looking for basic information
on any of the most important languages of the world.
Bernard Comrie began his academic career as a Lecturer at the University
of Cambridge. From 1978 until 1998 he was on the faculty of the University
of California, before moving to Leipzig as a Director in the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutional Anthropology. He is the author of 9 books, editor
of 9 more, and author of no less than 265 scholarly papers. He is editor
of two international journals and a member of 17 editorial boards.
For several decades, the first name a linguist has thought of in connection
with linguistic typology is Bernard Comrie. No other linguist has exhibited
such breadth of interest, or such incisive contributions to theoretical
debate. And his work extends beyond this, to the intersection of linguistics
with archaeology, and with psychology. Most recently he has begun exploring
the connection between genetics and linguistics.
No one has done more than Bernard Comrie to advance our understanding
of the nature of the human language faculty, and its cognitive basis.
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