Bernard Sterling Comrie,[1] 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.
Bernard Sterling Comrie | |
---|---|
Born | 23 May 1947 |
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 |
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]
He married linguistics professor Akiko Kumahira in 1985.[5][6]
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]
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]