A short academic biography

I got my graduate training in the Cognitive Anthropology Group at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and received my Ph.D. degree in 1997 from the University of Zürich. From 1995 through 1998 I taught part-time in Zürich and worked as a researcher at the University of Mainz (Department of General and Comparative Linguistics). I then spent three years at the University of California, Berkeley (Department of Slavic Languages), on a fellowship sponsored by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2001 I completed my Habilitation at Zürich and was awarded an extracurricular professorship (Förderungsprofessur) by the Swiss National Science Foundation. From 2002 until 2011, I was professor of linguistic typology and variation at the University of Leipzig (Department of General Linguistics), and in 2011 I took over the chair of general linguistics at the University of Zürich.

My core interest is the worldwide distribution of linguistic diversity. This involves the development of variables that allow measuring diversity, the formulation of theories explaining the distribution of these variables, and the study of the relationships of linguistic distributions to (biological) genetic diversity as well as to cultural and cognitive diversity. The methods used in this research range from the statistical analysis of typological databases to ethnolinguistic fieldwork and experimental methods.

Current foci of research include the typological profile of the Himalayas and the Caucasus, which deviate from the surrounding Eurasian spead areas; the analysis of cross-linguistic variation in the domains of clause linkage and grammatical relations as well the impact of this variation on discourse style and language processing; and the development of new methods for measuring and testing universal and areal distributions and their historical developments.

My fieldwork experience began with Bantu and Turkish, but since the early 90s my main focus has been on typological outlier languages in the Himalayas, where I have been engaged in extensive research on the Kiranti people of Eastern Nepal, and also on the neighboring Indo-Aryan languages (Nepali and Maithili). My most recent effort in this area is an interdisciplinary documentation project on Chintang and Puma and I continue research on Chintang within the Chintang Language Research Program.

I am co-director (with Johanna Nichols) of the AUTOTYP research program for typological databasing, and co-editor (with Ekkehard König) of the journal Studies in Language. I also serve on the editorial boards of the journals Folia Linguistica and Himalayan Linguistics and of the book series Typological Studies in Language and Brill's Studies in South and Southwest Asian Languages. I am a member of the Linguistic Advisory Board of the Documentation of Endangered Languages Program (DOBES) and from 2005 to 2010 I was a member of the Executive Committee of the Association for Linguistic Typology.

A full CV is available on request (balthasar.bickel@uzh.ch).