Bernard Comrie

Bernard Comrie’s expertise is in syntax, semantics, typology, and language universals.  He has done research on a wide variety of linguistic structures from a typological perspective, including relative clauses, causative constructions, grammatical relations, tense and aspect systems, conditionals, and others.  The article that he co-authored with Edward Keenan in 1977, “Noun Phrase Accessibility and Universal Grammar,” is one of the most significant works on the typology of relative clauses regarding how accessible a grammatical role is to relativization cross-linguistically.  His most recent research project is a typological survey of ditransitive constructions.  He is one of the main authors of The World Atlas of Language Structures (2005).  See Florida Linguistics’ “Ling Links” section in the main menu for a description and link to WALS Online.