32.3048, Featured Linguist: Bernard Comrie

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3048. Tue Sep 28 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3048, Featured Linguist: Bernard Comrie

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Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2021 23:45:21
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Featured Linguist: Bernard Comrie

 
My home town of Sunderland, in the northeast of England, was perhaps not the
most propitious birth place for one whose interests were to encompass
worldwide language diversity. Even less so the villages to the north of
Sunderland where I grew up, and where hardly a foreign word was heard. It was,
however, a good laboratory for lower-level diversity, at the dialect level.
For don’t, the people to the north said divn’t ['dɪvnt], while we said dinnot
['dɪnət], and the folks to the south of Sunderland still used the thou series
of second person singular pronouns. And I had an added source of linguistic
diversity: a Jamaican father. While he never exposed us to Jamaican Creole,
his English was still full of Jamaicanisms. His warning cry Mind you fall! (=
Mind you don’t fall! in “mainstream” English) still rings in my ears. But
whatever their source, the seeds of more exotic linguistic interest were sown,
and at age 7 I duly told my mother that I wanted to learn French. My mother
had “school French”, and she did everything to encourage my strange interest,
even taking me on vacation to France a year later at a time when foreign
vacations were by no means the norm in our social milieu. My first week
immersed in a foreign language environment! I’m not sure that my parents ever
really understood what drives me as a linguist. And certainly nothing is
guaranteed to bring a tenured full professor of linguistics more rapidly down
to earth than when their mother says So when are you going to get a real job?
But they always offered me their fullest support.

At grammar school (≈ junior high school + high school) I took all the language
offerings available, and even increased my oddity from the perspective of my
peers by taking evening classes in Russian at the local community college. I
also took advantage of the burgeoning possibilities of school trips to the
European continent. I think that over the years I borrowed all the admittedly
restricted set of foreign language textbooks from Sunderland library, and also
started my own collection – one Teach Yourself language course (in those days
just a book, with grammar and translation exercises) conveniently cost one
week’s pocket money. But then came the real revelation, when the library
started getting books about a subject called linguistics.  I already knew what
I wanted to be: a linguist! Incidentally, it was also in grammar school that I
undertook my first typological project, though I wouldn’t have known to name
it that at the time. The Classics teacher had just introduced the Ancient
Greek rule whereby a neuter plural subject requires singular verb agreement,
and mused whether any other languages had a similar rule. I took that as a
personal challenge and scoured the grammars available to me to draw up a list
of comparable phenomena. With hindsight, the sample was ludicrously small and
biased, and my results were certainly not a publishable article, but I had cut
my typological teeth.

My undergraduate and graduate years at Cambridge were a mix of advanced
language study (French, German, Russian), historical linguistics, and what was
then a rather new academic subject in Britain, namely (general) linguistics.
In my student days the last was largely generative grammar of the day, though
I always had my mind on cross-linguistic variation, and soon after completing
my doctoral dissertation I moved definitively toward linguistic typology. I’ll
fast forward through the rest of my career to leave time for the present, but
suffice it to say that I have doggedly pursued the view that understanding
Language means understanding languages, that the linguist has to take
cross-linguistic diversity seriously. And needless to say, I have been pleased
to see more and more subfields of linguistics and approaches to language
embracing this ideal. The phenomena that have interested me have been
primarily syntactic, with some excursions into morphology and semantics (and
even beyond), with recurring interests being relative clauses, valence and
voice, and alignment – I consider my first meeting with the phenomenon of
ergativity to be one of the truly transformative events of my life. Throughout
this time and across the world, I have been blessed with teachers, colleagues,
and students (these are not always discrete categories) who have provided an
environment that has cherished my approach to language. In addition, I have
had the opportunity to work with members of indigenous communities who have
broadened not only my understanding of language but also my outlook on life.
My great hope for the future: that indigenous communities will be empowered to
study their own languages.

The COVID-19 pandemic in which we currently find ourselves is a tragedy,
including for indigenous communities, and nothing that I will go on to say
detracts from this. But for me, there have indeed been some silver linings.
One has been the development of online lectures, which means both that I have
been able to “attend” lectures that even in the best of times would have been
geographically inaccessible to me, and also that I have been able to present
my own ideas to international audiences, and even have them immortalized on
YouTube. Another has been the opportunity – forced by necessity – to explore
the range of scientific resources available on the internet, especially during
the period when libraries were hermetically sealed and interlibrary loan
inoperative. For instance, I am working on a project that requires me to
identify basic color terms in a fixed set of Germanic, Slavic, and Romance
languages. Under current circumstances, where was I going to find the relevant
material for Wymysorys, an offshoot of German spoken in the small town of
Wilamowice, Poland? Catalogs told me that an extensive dictionary was
published in Poland in the 1930s, but imagine my joy when I discovered that an
excellent photographic reproduction of the dictionary is available at
Wikimedia Commons. And where was I going to find the color terms of
Istro-Romanian, spoken by a few hundred people in a handful of villages on the
Istrian peninsula in Croatia? Well, it turns out that an article on just this
topic is available open access on the web site of the Slovenian journal
Jezikoslovni zapiski. Does this mean that I will be avoiding the library when
it reopens? Far from it. I already have a list of references that are not
available online and that I will need to check via interlibrary loan once I
have worked through the material I already have. And just as a library needs
librarians to curate its holdings, so too the various internet sites that I
have been exploiting also need to be curated – it is only too easy to take for
granted that things are freely available on the internet while forgetting how
much effort and cost is involved in keeping existing material accessible and
making new material available.

Which brings me to the Linguist List. I can remember a time before there was
the Linguist List, though those memories are getting vague. How did we cope in
those days? Well, to be honest, we just did without a lot of information, or
in some cases could get the information but only by time-consuming means of
varying reliability. No ready list of conferences across different subfields
and in different parts of the world; you basically found out about the
conferences linked to societies you had joined and networks you had
infiltrated, with the information circulating by snail mail. No ready list of
new publications. If you had a question, you could ask the people around you,
and you might send letters to a few others, but the thought of reaching
thousands of people instantaneously was not even a dream. Now all of this and
much more is available thanks to the Linguist List. But this easy
accessibility has its danger: We start to take it for granted. It is only
thanks to the hard work of the Linguist List team that this material is
available, and curating this material does cost money. So please, donate what
you can to the Linguist List. Every small amount helps. Each year I make sure
that I make my own donation, secure in the knowledge that this sum is going to
benefit our field in a way that would not have been imaginable just a few
decades ago, but that now is indispensable.







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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3048	
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