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Balthasar Bickel

Professor of General Linguistics, University of Zurich

Compared to the communication system of other species, human language is strikingly diverse. My research aims at understanding this diversity with rigorously tested causal models, i.e. at answering the question *what’s where why* in language. What structures are there, and how exactly do they vary? Where and under which conditions do we find specific structures? Why do languages evolve and diversify in the way they do?

Experience

  • –present
    Professor of Comparative Linguistics, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich