Balthasar Bickel (born December 19, 1965) is a Swiss linguist. Bickel is a specialist in

linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the co ...

and on

Tibeto-Burman languages The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken throughout the Southeast Asian Massif ("Zomia") as well as parts of East Asia and South Asia. Around 60 million people speak ...

, especially languages of the

Kiranti The Kirati people, also spelled as Kirant or Kiranti, are a Sino-Tibetan ethnic group. They are peoples of the Himalayas, mostly the Eastern Himalaya extending eastward from Nepal to North East India (predominantly in the Indian state of Sikkim ...

group. He is currently a professor at the Department of Comparative Language Science at the

University of Zurich The University of Zürich (UZH, german: Universität Zürich) is a public research university located in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 f ...

. Between 2002 and 2011, he taught at the

Leipzig University Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), 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 ...

in Germany. He received his graduate training at the

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (German: ''Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik''; Dutch: ''Max Planck Instituut voor Psycholinguïstiek'') is a research institute situated on the campus of Radboud University Nijmegen located ...

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 land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, 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. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of C ...

. Bickel has made contributions to the study of tense and

aspect Aspect or Aspects may refer to: Entertainment * ''Aspect magazine'', a biannual DVD magazine showcasing new media art * Aspect Co., a Japanese video game company * Aspects (band), a hip hop group from Bristol, England * ''Aspects'' (Benny Carter ...

grammatical agreement In linguistics, agreement or concord (abbreviated ) occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category (such as gender ...

and

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

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

, phonological word domains, areal typology,

linguistic relativity The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis , the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, is a principle suggesting that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view, worldview or cognition, and ...

, and more recently 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 co-editor of the journal ''

Studies in Language ''Studies in Language'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering research in linguistics as viewed from discourse-pragmatic, functional, and typological perspectives. It is published by John Benjamins Publishing Company and was established ...

''.

Partial bibliography

* "Aspect, mood, and time in Belhare." Zürich: ASAS. (1996) * "On the syntax of agreement in Tibeto-Burman."

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)

External links

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