Balthasar Bickel holds the chair of general linguistics at the Department of Comparative Language Science, University of Zurich. He got his graduate training in the Cognitive Anthropology group at the MPI in Nijmegen and received his PhD in 1997 from the University of Zurich. After postdocs in Mainz and Berkeley and an assistant professorship in Zurich, he became a professor of linguistic typology at the University of Leipzig in 2002, and then moved to Zurich in 2011. Since 2020 he is a founding director of Switzerland’s National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) “Evolving Language”.
The key to understanding the nature and origins of language lies in the interplay of the biological and cultural factors that shaped, and continue to shape, its evolution. Untangling this interplay is hard because we can only access a degenerate snapshot of the linguistic diversity and design space in our species’ history. I will begin my talk by reviewing new evidence for this challenge and then suggest a way out by targeting underlying evolutionary mechanisms rather than their results. In the main part of my talk I will present recent research that combines evidence for biased mechanisms from (neuro)biological research with phylogenetic modeling of typological data. I will focus on two case studies, one from phonology (labiodental segments) and one from syntax (agent coding), disentangling biological and cultural factors in each.
