Balthasar Bickel (born December 19, 1965) is a Swiss linguist. He combines fieldwork, typology, and evolutionary modelling and uses both experimental and observational methods. He is currently a professor at the Department of Comparative Language Science at the

University of Zurich The University of Zurich (UZH, ) is a public university, public research university in Zurich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of the ...

. Between 2002 and 2011, he taught at the

Leipzig University Leipzig University (), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December 1409 by Frederick I, Electo ...

in Germany. He received his graduate training at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and earned his doctoral degree from the University of Zurich. As a postdoctoral researcher, he spent several years at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, where he became a close collaborator of

Johanna Nichols Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Career She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the Univer ...

. Bickel has made contributions to the study of tense and aspect, grammatical agreement and

grammatical relation In linguistics, grammatical relations (also called grammatical functions, grammatical roles, or syntactic functions) are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional g ...

morphological typology Morphological typology is a linguistic typology, way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common Morphology (linguistics), morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how ...

, phonological word domains, areal typology,

linguistic relativity Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition. One form of linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, regards peoples' languages as determining and influencing the scope of cultural perceptions of their surro ...

, and to quantitative methods in language typology. He has done extensive fieldwork on a number of Kiranti languages of Nepal, especially Belhare, Chintang and Puma. He is former co-editor of the journal '' Studies in Language''. Research out of Bickel's lab suggests that with the spread of

agriculture Agriculture encompasses crop and livestock production, aquaculture, and forestry for food and non-food products. Agriculture was a key factor in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created ...

and a switch to softer foods the

overbite Overbite is the extent of vertical ( superior-inferior) overlap of the maxillary central incisors over the mandibular central incisors, measured relative to the incisal ridges. The term overbite does not refer to a specific condition, nor is ...

common among children became more prevalent in adults resulting in an increase in

labiodental In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth, such as and . In English, labiodentalized /s/, /z/ and /r/ are characteristic of some individuals; these may be written . Labiodental consonants in ...

s such as "f" and "v" in human language.

Partial bibliography

* "Aspect, mood, and time in Belhare." Zürich: ASAS. (1996) * "On the syntax of agreement in Tibeto-Burman." Studies in Language 24, 583 – 609 (2000) * Belhare. In Thurgood, G. & R. J. LaPolla (eds.) The Sino-Tibetan languages, 546 – 70. London: Routledge (2003) * "Referential density in discourse and syntactic typology." Language 79, 708 – 736 (2003) * (with Johanna Nichols) "Inflectional synthesis of the verb." In Haspelmath, M., M. S. Dryer, D. Gil, & B. Comrie (eds.) The world atlas of language structures, 94 – 97. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2005/2008) online * "Typology in the 21st century: major current developments." Linguistic Typology 11, 239 – 251 (2007) * "Grammatical relations typology." In Song, J. J. (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Language Typology, pp. 399 – 444, Oxford: Oxford University Press (2011)

References

External links

Homepage at the University of Zurich
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bickel, Balthasar 1965 births Living people Linguists from Switzerland University of Zurich alumni Academic staff of Leipzig University