On December 14th, Professor Bernard Comrie, world-famous linguist, authority on language typology, and the director of the German Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, gave a fabulous academic report with the title of “Areal Typology and the World Atlas of Language Structures” to teachers and students in SIS. Professor He Huibin, the deputy dean of our school, hosted the report meeting.

  It took five years for the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology to complete a large-scale research project of language typology, a very small part of which was revealed to the audience in this 1.5-hour report. Professor Comrie intuitively showed the distribution situation of OV and VO in the world, especially in the East Asia, and presented the assumption that the different sequences may cause changes in the position of involved nouns, adjectives and quantifiers by showing the verification results in the map. Then he summed up the similarities, differences and interactions between the position changes and the sequence of “OV and VO” in the Northern, Middle and Southern area of Asia. Teachers and students had a heated discussion with Professor Comrie on the classification principle of the linguistic type. The report brought us a brand new angle of view on linguistics and the newest research trends, having helped us to broad our perspective in study.

  Professor Comrie currently occupies the Direct of the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, the distinguished professor of UCSB (University of California，Santa Barbara), and the honorary professor of linguistics in Leipzig University. He used to be the first President of Linguistic Typology Association. Now he is the editorial board member of Linguistics -- an international authority academic journal, and the executive editor of Studies in Language. Meanwhile, he occupies important positions in several international academic organizations, such as the correspondence academician of European Academy of Sciences and British Academy, and the committee member of International Pragmatic Association, Linguistics Association of Great Britain and Linguistics Society of America.

(Translated by LIN Jiang)