Bernard Comrie

Bernard Comrie is a Research Professor Emeritus in Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), affiliated with the College of Letters and Science. He previously served as Director of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig (1998–2015) and held a Distinguished Professorship at UCSB (2002–2021). His career includes teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Southern California, and leadership roles in major research institutions.

Comrie’s research focuses on

• Language universals and typology
• Historical linguistics
• Languages of the Caucasus, New Guinea, and Great Andamanese

He emphasizes fieldwork-driven cross-linguistic analysis of topics like tense/aspect, transitivity, numeral systems, and prehistoric migration studies through collaborations with archaeologists and geneticists.

His recent publications explore morphosyntactic variation (e.g., verb indexing in Asian languages, reflexivity in Tsez), language contact (Kanashi prehistory), and numeral system typology. Articles often bridge theoretical linguistics with empirical data from understudied languages.

Notable contributions include the World Atlas of Language Structures and foundational work on Nakh-Daghestanian and Andamanese languages. He advocates for interdisciplinary approaches to reconstructing prehistoric human movements via linguistic evidence.