LSA 2009

Bernard Comrie is Director of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara. His main interests are language universals and typology, historical linguistics (including in particular the use of linguistic evidence to reconstruct aspects of prehistory), linguistic fieldwork, and languages of the Caucasus. Publications include Aspect (1976), Language Universals and Linguistic Typology (1981, 1989), The Languages of the Soviet Union (1981), Tense (1985), The Russian Language in the Twentieth Century (with Gerald Stone and Maria Polinsky, 1996). He is also editor of The World's Major Languages (1987, new edition in preparation), co-editor (with Greville Corbett) of The Slavonic Languages (1993) and (with Martin Haspelmath, Matthew Dryer, and David Gil) of The World Atlas of Language Structures (Oxford, 2005), and managing editor of the journal Studies in Language.