Balthasar Bickel

Balthasar Bickel (born December 19, 1965 in Flawil ) is a Swiss linguist . Bickel is a specialist in the fields of language typology and the Tibetan Burmese languages , especially languages of the Kiranti group .

He is Professor of General Linguistics at the Institute for Comparative Linguistics at the University of Zurich . Between 2002 and 2011 he was a professor at the University of Leipzig . He was a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and received his doctorate from the University of Zurich. He spent several years as a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley , where he worked closely with Johanna Nichols . In 2016 he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea .

Bickel's focus lies in the areas of tense and aspect , congruence and syntactic functions , morphological typology , phonological word domains, area typology , linguistic relativity , and recently quantitative methods in language typology. He has done extensive field research on Kiranti languages in Nepal, especially Belhare , Chintang and Puma . He is co-editor of the journal Studies in Language .

Works (selection)

Aspect, mood, and time in Belhare. ASAS, Zurich 1996.
On the syntax of agreement in Tibeto-Burman. In: Studies in Language . Vol. 24 (2000), pp. 583-609.
Belhare. In: Graham Thurgood, Randy J. LaPolla (Eds.): The Sino-Tibetan languages. Routledge, London 2003, pp. 546-570.
Referential density in discourse and syntactic typology. In: Language. 79: 708-736 (2003).
(with Johanna Nichols ) Inflectional synthesis of the verb. In: Martin Haspelmath , Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil, & Bernard Comrie (Eds.): The world atlas of language structures. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005, pp. 94-97 ( online ).
Typology in the 21st century: major current developments. In: Linguistic Typology. Vol. 11 (2007), pp. 239-251.
Grammatical relations typology. In: Jae Jung Song (Ed.): The Oxford handbook of linguistic typology. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011, pp. 399-444.