Balthasar Bickel, born December 19, 1965, is a Swiss linguist. Bickel is a specialist in linguistic typology

Linguistic typology

Linguistic typology is a subfield of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features. Its aim is to describe and explain the common properties and the structural diversity of the world's languages...

 and on Tibeto-Burman languages

Tibeto-Burman languages

The Tibeto-Burman languages are the non-Chinese members of the Sino-Tibetan language family, over 400 of which are spoken thoughout the highlands of southeast Asia, as well as lowland areas in Burma ....

, especially languages of the Kiranti

Kiranti languages

The Mahakiranti or Maha-Kiranti languages are a proposed intermediate level of classification of the Tibeto-Burman languages. They are the languages most closely related to the Kiranti languages proper, which are spoken by the ethnic Kirat...

 group.

He is currently a professor at the Seminar for General Linguistics at the University of Zurich

University of Zurich

The University of Zurich , located in the city of Zurich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 25,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy....

. Between 2002 and 2011, he taught at the University of Leipzig

University of Leipzig

The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...

 in Germany. He received his graduate training at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute for scientific research in the area of psycholinguistics. The institute is located in Nijmegen in the province of Gelderland in The Netherlands. The institute is a member of the German Max Planck Society and is the only institute of...

 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

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, where he became a close collaborator of Johanna Nichols

Johanna Nichols

Linguist Johanna Nichols is a professor emerita on active duty in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic...

.

Bickel has made contributions to the study of tense

Tense

Tense may refer to:*Grammatical tense, a temporal linguistic quality expressing the time at, during, or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs...

 and aspect

Aspect

Aspect may be:*Aspect , a feature that is linked to many parts of a program, but which is not necessarily the primary function of the program...

, grammatical agreement

Agreement (linguistics)

In languages, agreement or concord is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase. Agreement happens when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates....

 and grammatical relations, morphological typology

Morphological typology

Morphological typology is a way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common morphological structures. First developed by brothers Friedrich von Schlegel and August von Schlegel, the field organizes languages on the basis of how those languages form...

, phonological word domains, areal typology, and more recently to quantitative methods in typology. He has done extensive fieldwork on a number of Kiranti languages of Nepal, especially Belhare

Belhare language

Belhare is a Kiranti language spoken by some 2,000 people living on the Belhara hill, at the southern foothills of the Himalayas situated in the Dhankuta district in Eastern Nepal....

, Chintang

Chintang language

Chintang , also called Chhintang is an eastern Kiranti language spoken by 5,000 to 6,000 people in Chintang Village Development Committee in Dhankuta District, Koshi Zone, Nepal.-References:...

 and Puma

Puma language

Puma is a Kiranti language spoken by about 4,310 people in Diplung, Mauwabote, Devisthan, Pauwasera and Chisapani Village Development Committees of Khotang district and in some areas of Udayapur district, Nepal.The Himalayan Languages Project has produced the first grammatical sketch of Puma...

. He is co-editor of the journal Studies in Language

Studies in Language

Studies in Language is an international peer-reviewed journal of linguistics as viewed from discourse-pragmatic, functional, and typological perspectives. It has been published by John Benjamins since 1977...

.

Partial bibliography

• “Aspect, mood, and time in Belhare.” Zürich: ASAS. (1996)
• “On the syntax of agreement in Tibeto-Burman.” Studies in Language
  Studies in Language
  Studies in Language is an international peer-reviewed journal of linguistics as viewed from discourse-pragmatic, functional, and typological perspectives. It has been published by John Benjamins since 1977...
  
   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