Bernard Comrie#
Short laudatio by Helmut Schnelle#
Bernard Comrie is one of the pioneers of the cross-linguistic study of language, in particular of the current investigation of linguistic typology. He has written standard monographs on verbal aspect (1976) and tense (1985), as well as influential articles on relative clauses, causative constructions, nominalizations, case, agreement, reference tracking, etc. His studies are particularly based on empirical field work on a variety of hitherto little described languages. Languages investigated include: Bezhta (North Caucasus), Gokana (Nigeria), Haruai (New Guinea), Huichol (Mexico), Tsez (North Caucasus). The theoretical import of these studies include case marking, clause structure, and gender systems. They led to innovative views relating to the interaction of vertical inheritance within a language family with horizontal diffusion in geographic area in language history, as in the study of the interaction of lexical borrowing and word taboo in Haruai, and the importance of areal patterning in understanding language history as documented in the World Atlas of Language Structures (2005).These studies also contributed to precise documentations of endangered and other little known languages.
Bernard Comrie also concentrated on various interdisciplinary studies. The first were devoted to comparing population genetic classification of populations and historical linguistic classifications of languages with a view to reconstructing prehistoric migrations, also taking into account evidence from archaeology and anthropology. This was particularly applied to the Indo-European Language Family (cp. ‘Farming dispersal in Europe and the spread of the Indo-European language family’, 2002). The second include research on the development of new phylogenetic methods in linguistics and sharing experience in constructing phylogenies between linguistics and other disciplines.
As a director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Bernard Comrie has also the institution internal task of representing linguistics in an inter¬disciplinary environment including geneticists, primatologists, palaeontologists, and psychologists. In the context of institution external cooperation he is active in the promotion of high-quality research, including inter-disciplinary research, on national, European, and intercontinental levels, for instance as a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Science Foundation Programme in Language Typology (1990-1994; chair of Core Group 1993-94), and as a member of the organizing committee of the European Science Foundation Programme “Origin of Man, Language and Languages” (since 2003.
He is also a co-managing editor of the journal Studies in Language (Benjamins, Amsterdam); co-editor of the monograph series Empirical Studies in Language Typology and Mouton Grammar Library (Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin); member of editorial board of numerous journals and monograph series, and a member of international evaluation panels for research programmes in the UK, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Finland, Italy, the USA, etc.
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