Bernard Comrie

orcid.org/0000-0003-0487-7005

List of John Benjamins publications for which Bernard Comrie plays a role.

Journals

Asian Languages and Linguistics (ALaL)

Edited by Danqing Liu, Ailan Fu and Gong Cheng

ISSN 2665-9336 | E-ISSN 2665-9344

Language and Linguistics (L&L)

Erik W. Hansen and Hans Frede Nielsen †

ISSN 0108-8416 | E-ISSN 2212-9715

Titles

Noun-Modifying Clause Constructions in Languages of Eurasia: Rethinking theoretical and geographical boundaries

Edited by Yoshiko Matsumoto, Bernard Comrie and Peter Sells

[Typological Studies in Language, 116] 2017. vi, 381 pp.

Subjects Semantics | Syntax | Theoretical linguistics | Typology

New Perspectives on the Origins of Language

Edited by Claire Lefebvre, Bernard Comrie and Henri Cohen

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 144] 2013. xvi, 582 pp.

Subjects Evolution of language | Historical linguistics | Theoretical linguistics

Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas: A typological overview

Edited by Bernard Comrie and Zarina Estrada-Fernández

[Typological Studies in Language, 102] 2012. xiii, 307 pp.

Subjects Historical linguistics | Languages of North America | Languages of South America | Syntax | Typology

Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations: A crosslinguistic typology

Edited by Pirkko Suihkonen, Bernard Comrie and Valery Solovyev

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 126] 2012. xv, 406 pp.

Subjects Semantics | Syntax | Theoretical linguistics | Typology

Introducing Maltese Linguistics: Selected papers from the 1st International Conference on Maltese Linguistics, Bremen, 18–20 October, 2007

Edited by Bernard Comrie, Ray Fabri, Elizabeth Hume, Manwel Mifsud, Thomas Stolz and Martine Vanhove

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 113] 2009. xi, 422 pp.

Subjects Afro-Asiatic languages | English linguistics | Theoretical linguistics

Linguistic Borrowing in Bilingual Contexts

Fredric Field

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 62] 2002. xviii, 252 pp.

Subjects Multilingualism | Sociolinguistics and Dialectology

Edited by Bernard Comrie and Maria Polinsky

[Studies in Language Companion Series, 23] 1993. x, 399 pp.

Subjects Functional linguistics | Theoretical linguistics | Typology

Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics: Papers from the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics. Volume III: Salt Lake City, Utah 1989

Edited by Bernard Comrie and Mushira Eid

[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 80] 1991. xii, 274 pp.

Subjects Afro-Asiatic languages

Typology of Resultative Constructions: Translated from the original Russian edition (1983)

Edited by Vladimir P. Nedjalkov

[Typological Studies in Language, 12] 1988. xx, 573 pp.

Subjects Syntax | Theoretical linguistics | Typology

Articles

2022. Typology. Handbook of Pragmatics: Manual, Verschueren, Jef and Jan-Ola Östman (eds.), pp. 1461–1464

Chapter

2021. Chapter 6. Swedish FrameNet++ and comparative linguistics. The Swedish FrameNet++: Harmonization, integration, method development and practical language technology applications, Dannélls, Dana, Lars Borin and Karin Friberg Heppin (eds.), pp. 139–166

In this chapter we describe a multilingual extension of Swedish FrameNet++, intended to address research questions of a broad comparative nature, in genealogical, areal and typological linguistics, focusing on the integration into Swedish FrameNet++ of so-called core vocabularies, used in several… read more | Chapter

Comrie, Bernard and Raoul Zamponi. 2021. Expanding the boundaries of Asian linguistics: Great Andamanese languages. Asian Languages and Linguistics 2:1, pp. 1–23

While the general lines of the areal linguistic typology of Asia are well known, there are some less well understood pockets that promise to throw light on the overall range of variation within the continent. These include the indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, which have for much of… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard, Diana Forker, Zaira Khalilova and Helma van den Berg. 2021. Chapter 16. Antipassives in Nakh-Daghestanian languages: Exploring the margins of a construction. Antipassive: Typology, diachrony, and related constructions, Janic, Katarzyna and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (eds.), pp. 515–548

Several Nakh-Daghestanian languages present constructions that are candidate antipassives, in that the construction is intransitive and is (at least sometimes) related to a corresponding transitive construction, with A of the transitive construction appearing as S of the intransitive, and P of the… read more | Chapter

2020. Chapter 1. Introduction. Perfects in Indo-European Languages and Beyond, Crellin, Robert and Thomas Jügel (eds.), pp. 1–14

This Introduction highlights some of the recurrent themes of the volume, in particular two diachronic paths: (i) resultative > perfect > perfective past; (ii) relaxation of an initial constraint restricting the perfect to results attributed to the patient. The latter leads to a discussion of be and… read more | Chapter

Comrie, Bernard. 2019. Possessive chains and Possessor Camouflage. Possession in Languages of Europe and North and Central Asia, Johanson, Lars, Lidia Federica Mazzitelli and Irina Nevskaya (eds.), pp. 51–84

In most recursive possessive chains like English the color of the covers of thebooks and the girl’s father’s house, from knowing the morphosyntax of possessor and possessum in bipartite constructions (the color of the books, the girl’s house), one can predict the morphosyntax of the intermediate… read more | Chapter

Davies, John and Bernard Comrie. 2019. Switch-reference in Kobon and Haruai: Areal influences within Highland New Guinea. Diverse Scenarios of Syntactic Complexity, Álvarez González, Albert, Zarina Estrada-Fernández and Claudine Chamoreau (eds.), pp. 13–26

Kobon and Haruai are two neighboring unrelated Papuan languages with similar syntactic typology. Within the overall space of cross-linguistic variation, their switch-reference systems are remarkably similar, though not identical, for instance strictly tracking the referent of the grammatical… read more | Chapter

Comrie, Bernard, Diana Forker and Zaira Khalilova. 2018. Chapter 3. Affective constructions in Tsezic languages. Non-Canonically Case-Marked Subjects: The Reykjavík-Eyjafjallajökull papers, Barðdal, Jóhanna, Na'ama Pat-El and Stephen Mark Carey (eds.), pp. 55–82

This article addresses affective (“experiencer”) constructions in the Tsezic languages (Nakh-Daghestanian), which represent the most frequent type of non-canonical subject constructions in these languages. They differ from transitive constructions in a number of ways that go far beyond case marking… read more | Chapter

Comrie, Bernard, Diana Forker and Zaira Khalilova. 2017. General noun-modifying clause constructions in Hinuq and Bezhta, with a note on other Daghestanian languages. Noun-Modifying Clause Constructions in Languages of Eurasia: Rethinking theoretical and geographical boundaries, Matsumoto, Yoshiko, Bernard Comrie and Peter Sells (eds.), pp. 121–146

Hinuq and Bezhta, two languages of the Tsezic sub-group of the Nakh-Daghestanian (East Caucasian) language family, have General noun modifying clause constructions (GNMCCs), which have also been noted in some other Nakh-Daghestanian languages. While readily acceptable and interpretable, GNMCCs that… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard, Peter Sells and Yoshiko Matsumoto. 2017. Conclusion. Noun-Modifying Clause Constructions in Languages of Eurasia: Rethinking theoretical and geographical boundaries, Matsumoto, Yoshiko, Bernard Comrie and Peter Sells (eds.), pp. 331–337

In this conclusion, we address three issues: a) the geographic extent of GNMCCs in Eurasia, including considerations of areal phenomena resulting from language contact; b) delimiting GNMCCs from other constructions, in particular those that in Japanese fall under GNMCCs; and c) structural… read more | Article

Matsumoto, Yoshiko, Bernard Comrie and Peter Sells. 2017. Noun-modifying clause constructions in languages of Eurasia: Rethinking theoretical and geographical boundaries. Noun-Modifying Clause Constructions in Languages of Eurasia: Rethinking theoretical and geographical boundaries, Matsumoto, Yoshiko, Bernard Comrie and Peter Sells (eds.), pp. 3–21

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2016. Finiteness in Haruai. Finiteness and Nominalization, Chamoreau, Claudine and Zarina Estrada-Fernández (eds.), pp. 71–82

Haruai, a non-Austronesian (“Papuan”) language of Papua New Guinea distinguishes, in terms of the indexing of person-number in the verb, between finite, semi-finite, and non-finite verb forms. There is a high, though not absolute, correlation between this scale and the scale running from main… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2016. Measuring language typicality, with special reference to the Americas. Language Contact and Change in the Americas: Studies in honor of Marianne Mithun, Berez-Kroeker, Andrea L., Diane M. Hintz and Carmen Jany (eds.), pp. 363–384

The World Atlas of Language Structures provides a means of calculating the index of typicality of a language, as the average of the percentage of the world’s languages that share that language’s feature value for each feature. Concentrating on languages represented by at least 100 features gives a… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard, Diana Forker and Zaira Khalilova. 2016. Chapter 7. Insubordination in the Tsezic Languages. Insubordination, Evans, Nicholas and Honoré Watanabe (eds.), pp. 171–182

The Tsezic languages present a number of prima facie instances of insubordination, given current definitions of this phenomenon. For the purposes of this chapter, we base ourselves on the definition provided by Evans (2007: 367): “[Insubordination is] the conventionalized main clause use of what,… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2015. From the Leipzig Glossing Rules to the GE and RX lines. Corpus-based Studies of Lesser-described Languages: The CorpAfroAs corpus of spoken AfroAsiatic languages, Mettouchi, Amina, Martine Vanhove and Dominique Caubet (eds.), pp. 207–219

The Leipzig Glossing Rules (http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/resources/glossing-rules.php) were devised with a very specific purpose in mind, namely to standardize the notations used by linguists in order to present the morphological structure of example sentences in language structures unfamiliar to… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2013. Ergativity: Some recurrent themes. The Acquisition of Ergativity, Bavin, Edith L. and Sabine Stoll (eds.), pp. 15–34

The article examines four areas within ergativity that merit further consideration, including with respect to child language acquisition data: (1) syntactic alignment, including in particular the delimitation of semantic alignment from other kinds of alignment with lexical exceptions, and symmetric… read more | Article

Cysouw, Michael and Bernard Comrie. 2013. Some observations on typological features of hunter-gatherer languages. Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols, Bickel, Balthasar, Lenore A. Grenoble, David A. Peterson and Alan Timberlake (eds.), pp. 383–394

The introduction of agriculture is a major event in human history, and this article offers a preliminary investigation into whether there might be structural features of language correlating with the distinction between languages spoken by hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. A number of feature… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2012. Introduction. Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations: A crosslinguistic typology, Suihkonen, Pirkko, Bernard Comrie and Valery Solovyev (eds.), pp. xiii–xvi

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2012. Some argument-structure properties of ‘give’ in the languages of Europe and Northern and Central Asia. Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations: A crosslinguistic typology, Suihkonen, Pirkko, Bernard Comrie and Valery Solovyev (eds.), pp. 17–36

The alignment typology of ditransitive constructions with the verb ‘give’ in languages of Europe and Northern and Central Asia is overwhelmingly of the indirective type, although there are sporadic occurrences of double object and secundative alignment, usually as alternatives to indirective… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard and Zarina Estrada-Fernández. 2012. Introduction. Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas: A typological overview, Comrie, Bernard and Zarina Estrada-Fernández (eds.), pp. ix–xiv

Article

Kuteva, Tania and Bernard Comrie. 2012. The evolution of language and elaborateness of grammar: The case of relative clauses in creole languages. Relative Clauses in Languages of the Americas: A typological overview, Comrie, Bernard and Zarina Estrada-Fernández (eds.), pp. 27–46

Starting from the assumption that creole languages present an opportunity for testing hypotheses on the evolution of complexity in language, we examine the number of markers used to construct relative clauses, more specifically in relativization on subjects. On the basis of a sample of 52 creole… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2011. Creoles and language typology. Creoles, their Substrates, and Language Typology, Lefebvre, Claire (ed.), pp. 599–611

The distinct social origin of creoles, along with pidgins and mixed languages, makes them a source of interest to typologists, given their interest in the cross-linguistic distribution of structural feature values. Typologists, like creolists before them, are interested in issues such as whether… read more | Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2010. Typology. Variation and Change: Pragmatic perspectives, Fried, Mirjam, Jan-Ola Östman and Jef Verschueren (eds.), pp. 234–238

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2009. Maltese and the World Atlas of Language Structures. Introducing Maltese Linguistics: Selected papers from the 1st International Conference on Maltese Linguistics, Bremen, 18–20 October, 2007, Comrie, Bernard, Ray Fabri, Elizabeth Hume, Manwel Mifsud, Thomas Stolz and Martine Vanhove (eds.), pp. 3–11

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2008. Inflectional morphology and language contact, with special reference to mixed languages. Language Contact and Contact Languages, Siemund, Peter and Noemi Kintana (eds.), pp. 15–32

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2008. Subordination, coordination: Form, semantics, pragmatics. Subordination and Coordination Strategies in North Asian Languages, Vajda, Edward J. (ed.), pp. 1–16

Miscellaneous

Kuteva, Tania and Bernard Comrie. 2006. The typology of relative clause formation in African languages. Studies in African Linguistic Typology, Voeltz, F.K. Erhard (ed.), pp. 209–228

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2004. 5. Oblique-case subjects in Tsez. Non-nominative Subjects: Volume 1, Bhaskararao, Peri and Karumuri V. Subbarao (eds.), pp. 113 ff.

Chapter

Comrie, Bernard. 2003. Left, right, and the cardinal directions: Some thoughts on consistency and usage. Motion, Direction and Location in Languages: In honor of Zygmunt Frajzyngier, Shay, Erin and Uwe Seibert (eds.), pp. 51–58

Article

Polinsky, Maria and Bernard Comrie. 2003. Constraints on Reflexivization in Tsez. Current Trends in Caucasian, East European and Inner Asian Linguistics: Papers in honor of Howard I. Aronson, Holisky, Dee Ann and Kevin Tuite (eds.), pp. 265–289

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2002. Participles in Tsez: An emergent word class?. Complex Sentences in Grammar and Discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson, Bybee, Joan L. and Michael Noonan (eds.), pp. 19–30

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2002. 6. Morphophonological alternations: Typology and diachrony. Morphology 2000: Selected papers from the 9th Morphology Meeting, Vienna, 24–28 February 2000, Bendjaballah, Sabrina, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Oskar E. Pfeiffer and Maria D. Voeikova (eds.), pp. 73–89

Chapter

Comrie, Bernard. 2001. “Love your enemies”: Affective constructions in two Daghestanian languages. Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics, and Discourse: A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer, Kenesei, István and Robert M. Harnish (eds.), pp. 59–72

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 2000. Review of Adone & Plag (1994): Creolization and language change. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 15:1, pp. 221–225

Review

Horie, Kaoru and Bernard Comrie. 2000. Introduction. Complementation: Cognitive and functional perspectives, Horie, Kaoru (ed.), pp. 1–10

Chapter

Comrie, Bernard. 1999. 40. Gender Affixes in Tsez: Synchrony and diachrony. The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences: Studies on the transition from historical-comparative to structural linguistics in honour of E.F.K. Koerner, Embleton, Sheila, John E. Joseph and Hans-Josef Niederehe (eds.), pp. 279 ff.

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 1999. Relative clauses: Structure and typology on the periphery of standard English. The Clause in English: In honour of Rodney Huddleston, Collins, Peter and David Lee (eds.), pp. 81 ff.

Article

Comrie, Bernard and Maria Polinsky. 1999. Form and Function in Syntax: Relative clauses in Tsez. Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics: Volume II: Case studies, Darnell, Michael, Edith A. Moravcsik, Michael Noonan, Frederick J. Newmeyer and Kathleen Wheatley (eds.), pp. 77 ff.

Article

Polinsky, Maria and Bernard Comrie. 1999. Possessor Raising in a Language that Does Not Have Any. External Possession, Payne, Doris L. and Immanuel Barshi (eds.), pp. 523 ff.

Article

Comrie, Bernard. 1998. Regular Sound Correspondences and Long-Distance Genetic Comparison. Nostratic: Sifting the Evidence, Salmons, Joseph C. and Brian D. Joseph (eds.), pp. 271 ff.

Article

Comrie, Bernard and Maria Polinsky. 1998. The great Daghestan case coax. Case, Typology and Grammar: In honor of Barry J. Blake, Siewierska, Anna and Jae Jung Song (eds.), pp. 95 ff.

Article

Nicholas, Nick and Bernard Comrie. 1998. Review of Jucker (1995): Historical Pragmatics: Pragmatic Developments in the History of English. Diachronica 15:1, pp. 165–174

Review

Comrie, Bernard. 1997. Review of Pagliuca (1994): Perspectives on Grammaticalization. Diachronica 14:1, pp. 163–166

Review

Comrie, Bernard. 1997. Markedness. Handbook of Pragmatics: 1996 Installment, Verschueren, Jef, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert † and Chris Bulcaen (eds.), pp. 1–13

Article