Balthasar Bickel
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 206482 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Balthasar Bickel |
| PRENOMES | Balthasar |
| SOBRENOME | Bickel |
| ASSINATURA | BICKEL B |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Zurich |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9087-0565 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 52 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 148 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 51 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1995 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 6 |
Exploring Amazonian Cognitive Diversity at Chana Research Station
The Chana Research Station for Language Sciences and Interculturality is a scientific initiative dedicated to exploring the linguistic, cultural, and cognitive diversity of the Peruvian Amazon. Building on long‐standing local partnerships and collaborations, Chana facilitates research on cognition that extends beyond populations from industrialized democracies, traditionally overrepresented in behavioral sciences. Other populations—such as those …
Child-Directed Speech Facilitates Semantic Role Learning
Semantic roles, namely the agent (‘doer’) and patient (‘undergoer’) roles, are fundamental to language acquisition, as they enable learners to map meaning onto syntactic structure. Grammars typically impose a binary classification on how these roles map onto syntactic functions. These functions are encoded through features such as agreement, case marking and word order, which children gradually acquire through exposure to their linguistic environ…
The Agent Preference in Ontogeny
Language comprehension unfolds incrementally, requiring listeners to continually predict and revise interpretations. Comprehenders across very diverse languages show a consistent preference for agents, anticipating the agent (“the doer” of an action) more strongly than the patient (“the undergoer”). An unresolved question is how the preference develops in children given incomplete utterances and argument omission in their input. Here, we approach…
Spontaneous Encoding of Event Roles in Hominids
When observing social interactions, humans rapidly and spontaneously encode events in terms of agents, patients and causal relations. This propensity can be made visible empirically with the switch cost paradigm, a reaction time experiment and well-established tool of cognitive psychology. We adapted the paradigm for non-human primates to test whether non-linguistic animals encoded event roles in the same way. Both human and non-human participant…
Discourse ergativity and human reference in Basque
One possible usage-based motivation for ergative alignment in grammars is the reference-establishing function shared by the sole argument of intransitives and the patient argument of transitives. Here we test this hypothesis, known as Preferred Argument Structure, against discourse data from Basque, a language with ergative case marking. While we do find a discourse-ergative distribution of lexical forms of reference, our results suggest animacy …
Paradigmatic complexity metrics as signals of phylogenetic relatedness
Morphological complexity metrics like entropy, and notions like the Paradigm Cell-Filling Problem, have recently (re)gained popularity for the synchronic analysis of inflectional systems. The potential of these quantitative approaches for diachronic research, however, remains largely untapped. This paper constitutes a first exploration of whether and, if so, how these methods can be used profitably in this domain. We first use Romance, for which …
Neural correlates of processing case in adults and children
Sentence-initial arguments with role-specific case markers (e.g., accusatives) have been reported to be processed slower than arguments with default case markers (e.g., nominatives), both in adults and children. However, the evidence for this comes from studies that conflate word order and case, comparing initial arguments with default case and fronted (scrambled) arguments with role-specific case. Here, we disentangle these effects by studying t…
Areal and phylogenetic dimensions of word order variation in Indo-European languages
Both areal and phylogenetic affiliation have been discussed as driving factors of the distribution of word order in the languages of the world. However, disentangling the interaction of these two factors is challenging. Here we take Indo-European as a test case. Word order in this family is largely homogeneous both within areas and within branches, which makes it difficult to assess which factor was more important in shaping the present-day distr…
Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers
Human evolutionary history in Central Africa reflects a deep history of population connectivity. However, Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) currently speak languages acquired from their neighbouring farmers. Hence it remains unclear which aspects of CAHG cultural diversity results from long-term evolution preceding agriculture and which reflect borrowing from farmers. On the basis of musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabul…
The Agent Preference in Visual Event Apprehension
A central aspect of human experience and communication is understanding events in terms of agent (“doer”) and patient (“undergoer” of action) roles. These event roles are rooted in general cognition and prominently encoded in language, with agents appearing as more salient and preferred over patients. An unresolved question is whether this preference for agents already operates during apprehension, that is, the earliest stage of event processing,…
Naturalness is gradient in morphological paradigms
Agreement markers that refer to the same feature or argument tend to be found in the same position (e.g., all subject agreement markers as suffixes, all object agreement markers as prefixes). However, little is known about the exceptions to this trend: cases where different values of the same feature are marked in different positions in the word (i.e., positional splits). In this study, we explore the positional properties of subject and object p…
Word order evolves at similar rates in main and subordinate clauses
In syntactic change, it remains an open issue whether word orders are more conservative or innovative in subordinate clauses compared with main clauses. Using 47 dependency-annotated corpora and Bayesian phylogenetic inference, we explore the evolution of S/V, V/O, and S/O orders across main and subordinate clauses in Indo-European. Our results reveal similar rates of change across clause types, with no evidence for any inherent conservatism of s…
Multi-variate coding for possession
In this work we are presenting a database structure to encode the phenomenon of differential possession across languages, considering noun possession classes and possessive constructions as independent but linked. We show how this structure can be used to study different dimensions of possession: semantics, noun valence, and possessive constructions. We present preliminary survey results from a global sample of 120 languages and show that there i…
More or Less Unnatural
Morphological systems often reuse the same forms in different functions, creating what is known as syncretism. While syncretism varies greatly, certain cross-linguistic tendencies are apparent. Patterns where all syncretic forms share a morphological feature value (e.g., first person, or plural number) are most common cross-linguistically, and this preference is mirrored in results from learning experiments. While this suggests a general bias tow…
Marcación Diferencial De Objeto Y Referencialidad en Quichua Santiagueño
El quichua santiagueo (quechua, Argentina) es una lengua de alineamiento nominativo-acusativo con marcacin de casos en los dependientes. En esta investigacin se sostiene que la distribucin del sufijo de caso acusativo (-ta) no responde exclusivamente al parmetro sintctico, sino que dicha marcacin es sensible a las propiedades semnticas del referente que se expresa. La distribucin del marcador -ta interacta con otros constituyentes y sufijos de la…
Cross-linguistic differences in case marking shape neural power dynamics and gaze behavior during sentence planning
Languages differ in how they mark the dependencies between verbs and arguments, e.g., by case. An eye tracking and EEG picture description study examined the influence of case marking on the time course of sentence planning in Basque and Swiss German. While German assigns an unmarked (nominative) case to subjects, Basque specifically marks agent arguments through ergative case. Fixations to agents and event-related synchronization (ERS) in the th…
Dependency-length minimization and its limits
Dependency-length minimization and its limits
A prominent principle in explaining a range of word-order regularities is dependency locality, which minimizes the linear distances (dependency lengths) between a head and its dependents. However, it remains unclear to what extent language users in fact observe locality when producing sentences under diverse conditions of cross-categorical harmony (such as the placement of verbal and nominal heads on the same vs. different sides of their dependen…
The extent and degree of utterance-final word lengthening in spontaneous speech from 10 languages
Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, as previous studies on individual languages have shown. This paper provides a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of relative durations of final and penultimate words in utterances in terms of the degree to which such words are lengthened. The study uses time-aligned corpora from 10 genealogically, areally, and culturally diverse languages, includi…
Beyond universals and particulars in language
In his target article “General linguistics must be based on universals (or nonconventional aspects of language)”, Martin Haspelmath invites us to reconsider the distinction between general linguistics and the linguistics of a particular language. The distinction is clearly useful to demarcate foci of interest and job descriptions. Also, it helps clarify what we expect our theories and models to achieve in terms of data fit: In general linguistics…
Appositive possession in Ainu and around the Pacific
Some languages around the Pacific have multiple possessive classes of alienable constructions using appositive nouns or classifiers. This pattern differs from the most common kind of alienable/inalienable distinction, which involves marking, usually affixal, on the possessum, and has only one class of alienables. The Japanese language isolate Ainu has possessive marking that is reminiscent of the Circum-Pacific pattern. It is distinctive, however…
Morphological structure can escape reduction effects from mass admixture of second language speakers
Morphological complexity is expected to decrease under mass admixture from adult second language speakers. While this has been chiefly shown for morphological richness, an unresolved question is whether the effect extends to aspects of morphological boundedness. Here we report a case study of Sino-Tibetan verbs, contrasting verbal expressions of two languages with very large (Chinese, Burmese) and of two languages with very small (Bunan, Chintang…
Numeral classifiers and number marking in Indo-Iranian
This paper investigates the origins of sortal numeral classifiers in the Indo-Iranian languages. While these are often assumed to result from contact with non-Indo-European languages, an alternative possibility is that classifiers developed as a response to the rise of optional plural marking. This alternative is in line with the so-called Greenberg-Sanches-Slobin (henceforth GSS ) generalization. The GSS generalization holds that the presence of…
Category clustering
Inflectional synthesis of the verb
The prosodic word is not universal, but emergent
In Prosodic Phonology, domains for the application of phonological patterns are commonly modeled as a Prosodic Hierarchy. The theory predicts, among other things, that (i) prosodic domains cluster on a single universal set of domains ('Clustering'), and (ii) no level of prosodic structure is skipped in the building of prosodic structure unless this is required by independently motivated higher ranking principles or constraints ('Strict Succession…
Typology in the 21st century
1. Typology as a discipline In the past century, typology was mostly used as an alternative method of pursuing one of the same goals as generative grammar: to determine the limits of possible human languages and, thereby, to contribute to a universal theory of grammar. The paradigm result was the absolute universal law that would rule out as linguistically impossible what would seem logically imaginable, e.g., a language with a gender distinction…
Grammatical Relations Typology
1. Grammatical relations past and present Traditionally, the term 'grammatical relation' (GR) refers to the morphosyntactic properties that relate an argument to a clause, as, for example, its subject or its object.Alternative terms are 'syntactic function' or 'syntactic role', and they highlight the fact that GRs are defined by the way in which arguments are integrated syntactically into a clause, i.e. by functioning as subject, object etc.Whate…
Free Prefix Ordering in Chintang
This article demonstrates prefix permutability in Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) that is not constrained by any semantic or morphosyntactic structure, or by any dialect, sociolect, or idiolect choice-a phenomenon ruled out by standard assumptions about grammatical words. The prefixes are fully fledged parts of grammatical words and are different from clitics on a large number of standard criteria. The analysis of phonological word domains suggest…
Referential Density in Discourse and Syntactic Typology
Narrative production experiments reveal systematic crosslinguistic differences in the preferred ratio of overt to possible argument NPs (called here the REFERENTIAL DENSITY value) between three pro-drop languages of the Himalayas (Belhare, Maithili, Nepali). These differences can be accounted for by the degree to which morphosyntactic features of NPs, especially case features, are relevant for syntactic processing. This degree is the higher the m…
Appositive possession in Ainu and around the Pacific
Some languages around the Pacific have multiple possessive classes of alienable constructions using appositive nouns or classifiers. This pattern differs from the most common kind of alienable/inalienable distinction, which involves marking, usually affixal, on the possessum, and has only one class of alienables. The Japanese language isolate Ainu has possessive marking that is reminiscent of the Circum-Pacific pattern. It is distinctive, however…
A fresh look at grammatical relations in Indo-Aryan
Deictic Transposition and Referential Practice in Belhare
A root alternation in Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) spatial demonstratives encodes the transposition of deictic fields to a zero-point distinct from the deictic origin. This kind ofgrammaticalized transposition is also fundamental for other parts of the grammar, including person deixis and mood categeries. Transposition in spatial deixis makes deliberation between places on "this" versus "the other" side of the transposed zero-point, a core issue…
Decomposing hierarchical alignment
Apart from common cases of differential argument marking, referential hierarchies affect argument marking in two ways: (a) through hierarchical marking, where markers compete for a slot and the competition is resolved by a hierarchy, and (b) through co-argument sensitivity, where the marking of one argument depends on the properties of its co-argument. Here we show that while co-argument sensitivity cannot be analyzed in terms of hierarchical mar…
Aspectual scope and the difference between logical and semantic representation
Category clustering
Recent research has revealed several languages (e.g. Chintang, Rarámuri, Tagalog, Murrinhpatha) that challenge the general expectation of strict sequential ordering in morphological structure. However, it has remained unclear whether these languages exhibit random placement of affixes or whether there are some underlying probabilistic principles that predict their placement. Here we address this question for verbal agreement markers and hypothesi…
Face vs. empathy
Maithili features one of the most complex agreement systems of any Indo-Aryan language. Not only nominative and non-nominative subjects, but also objects, other core arguments, and even nonarguments are cross-referenced, allowing for a maximum of three participants encoded by the verb desinences. The categories reflected in the morphology are person, honorific degree, and, in the case of third persons, gender, spatial distance, and focus. However…
Dependency-length minimization and its limits
A prominent principle in explaining a range of word-order regularities is dependency locality, which minimizes the linear distances (dependency lengths) between a head and its dependents. However, it remains unclear to what extent language users in fact observe locality when producing sentences under diverse conditions of cross-categorical harmony (such as the placement of verbal and nominal heads on the same vs. different sides of their dependen…
NP recursion over time
Some languages constrain the recursive embedding of NPs to some specific morphosyntactic types, allowing it, for example, only with genitives but not with bare juxtaposition. In Indo-European, every type of NP embedding-genitives, adjectivizers, adpositions, head marking, or juxtaposition-is unavailable for syntactic recursion in at least one attested language. In addition, attested pathways of change show that NP types that allow recursion can e…
Multi-variate coding for possession
In this work we are presenting a database structure to encode the phenomenon of differential possession across languages, considering noun possession classes and possessive constructions as independent but linked. We show how this structure can be used to study different dimensions of possession: semantics, noun valence, and possessive constructions. We present preliminary survey results from a global sample of 120 languages and show that there i…
Deep history of cultural and linguistic evolution among Central African hunter-gatherers
Human evolutionary history in Central Africa reflects a deep history of population connectivity. However, Central African hunter-gatherers (CAHGs) currently speak languages acquired from their neighbouring farmers. Hence it remains unclear which aspects of CAHG cultural diversity results from long-term evolution preceding agriculture and which reflect borrowing from farmers. On the basis of musical instruments, foraging tools, specialized vocabul…
Binomials and the Noun-to-Verb Ratio in Puma Rai Ritual Speech
This article examines the pairing of nouns in the type of parallelism known as binominals, expressions of paired words, in Puma Rai ritual speech. Using a large corpus of ritual and everyday language texts resulting from a language documentation project among the Puma Rai in Nepal, we explore the characteristics of ritual binomials and provide a quantitative analysis of noun-to-verb ratios in the two major ritual speech genres (shamanic and pries…
Relatives à antécédent interne, nominalisation et focalisation
NOMINALISATION ET FOCALISATION : ENTRE SYNTAXE ET
In the Vestibule of Meaning
In the Belhare (Tibeto-Burman) verb, morphotactics and allomorphy, but not morpheme semantics, are sensitive to a distinction between direct (1>2, 1>3, 2>3, 3SG>3) and inverse (3NS>3, 3>2, 3>1, 2>1) participant configurations. Comparison of this phenomenon with Cree (Algonquian) and rGya-ro (Tibeto-Burman) calls for a distinction of morphemic and sub- or supra-morphemic inversion. The difference is semiotically interpreted in a general theory of …
Aspectual scope and the difference between logical and semantic representation
From Ergativus Absolutus to Topic Marking in Kiranti
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (2000)
Face vs. empathy
Maithili features one of the most complex agreement systems of any Indo-Aryan language. Not only nominative and non-nominative subjects, but also objects, other core arguments, and even nonarguments are cross-referenced, allowing for a maximum of three participants encoded by the verb desinences. The categories reflected in the morphology are person, honorific degree, and, in the case of third persons, gender, spatial distance, and focus. However…
On the syntax of agreement in Tibeto-Burman
Verb agreement in Tibeto-Burman languages follows a different principle than in other, especially Indo-European languages. Instead of limiting agreement to the unification of features of the agreement trigger with those of the target, Tibeto-Burman languages also allow NP features to combine with the features marked by the agreement morphology in an appositional (‘as NP’), partitional (‘NP of’) or relational (‘NP with regard to’) structure. This …
A fresh look at grammatical relations in Indo-Aryan
Deictic Transposition and Referential Practice in Belhare
A root alternation in Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) spatial demonstratives encodes the transposition of deictic fields to a zero-point distinct from the deictic origin. This kind ofgrammaticalized transposition is also fundamental for other parts of the grammar, including person deixis and mood categeries. Transposition in spatial deixis makes deliberation between places on "this" versus "the other" side of the transposed zero-point, a core issue…
Syntactic Ergativity in Light Verb Complements
No abstract available
Referential Density in Discourse and Syntactic Typology
Narrative production experiments reveal systematic crosslinguistic differences in the preferred ratio of overt to possible argument NPs (called here the REFERENTIAL DENSITY value) between three pro-drop languages of the Himalayas (Belhare, Maithili, Nepali). These differences can be accounted for by the degree to which morphosyntactic features of NPs, especially case features, are relevant for syntactic processing. This degree is the higher the m…
Oceania, the Pacific Rim, and the Theory of Linguistic Areas
Inflectional morphology
Introduction The prototypical inflectional categories include number, tense, person, case, gender, and others, all of which usually produce different forms of the same word rather than different words. Thus leaf and leaves , or write and writes , or run and ran are not given separate headwords in dictionaries. Derivational categories, in contrast, do form separate words, so that leaflet , writer , and rerun will figure as separate words in dictio…
Typology in the 21st century
1. Typology as a discipline In the past century, typology was mostly used as an alternative method of pursuing one of the same goals as generative grammar: to determine the limits of possible human languages and, thereby, to contribute to a universal theory of grammar. The paradigm result was the absolute universal law that would rule out as linguistically impossible what would seem logically imaginable, e.g., a language with a gender distinction…
Free Prefix Ordering in Chintang
This article demonstrates prefix permutability in Chintang (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal) that is not constrained by any semantic or morphosyntactic structure, or by any dialect, sociolect, or idiolect choice-a phenomenon ruled out by standard assumptions about grammatical words. The prefixes are fully fledged parts of grammatical words and are different from clitics on a large number of standard criteria. The analysis of phonological word domains suggest…
Introduction Theory and typology of the word
1. Introduction This special issue is a collection of seven papers dealing with the theory and typology of the word . In Section 2 we discuss various theoretical issues and typological generalizations involving grammatical words and phonological words . Section 3 provides a brief summary of the main ideas contained in the seven articles and shows how they relate to the general topics discussed in Section 2. Section 4 points to future areas of res…
Studies in Ditransitive Constructions
This rich volume deals comprehensively with cross-linguistic variation in the morphosyntax of ditransitive constructions: constructions formed with verbs (like give) that take Agent, Theme and Recipient arguments. For the first time, a broadly cross-linguistic perspective is adopted. The present volume, consisting of an overview article and twenty-odd in-depth studies of ditransitive constructions in individual languages from different continents…
Grammatical Relations Typology
1. Grammatical relations past and present Traditionally, the term 'grammatical relation' (GR) refers to the morphosyntactic properties that relate an argument to a clause, as, for example, its subject or its object.Alternative terms are 'syntactic function' or 'syntactic role', and they highlight the fact that GRs are defined by the way in which arguments are integrated syntactically into a clause, i.e. by functioning as subject, object etc.Whate…
The prosodic word is not universal, but emergent
In Prosodic Phonology, domains for the application of phonological patterns are commonly modeled as a Prosodic Hierarchy. The theory predicts, among other things, that (i) prosodic domains cluster on a single universal set of domains ('Clustering'), and (ii) no level of prosodic structure is skipped in the building of prosodic structure unless this is required by independently motivated higher ranking principles or constraints ('Strict Succession…
Binomials and the Noun-to-Verb Ratio in Puma Rai Ritual Speech
This article examines the pairing of nouns in the type of parallelism known as binominals, expressions of paired words, in Puma Rai ritual speech. Using a large corpus of ritual and everyday language texts resulting from a language documentation project among the Puma Rai in Nepal, we explore the characteristics of ritual binomials and provide a quantitative analysis of noun-to-verb ratios in the two major ritual speech genres (shamanic and pries…
Nouns and verbs in Chintang
Analyzing the development of the noun-to-verb ratio in a longitudinal corpus of four Chintang (Sino-Tibetan) children, we find that up to about age four, children have a significantly higher ratio than adults. Previous cross-linguistic research rules out an explanation of this in terms of a universal noun bias; instead, a likely cause is that Chintang verb morphology is polysynthetic and difficult to learn. This hypothesis is supported by the fac…
Language typology and historical contingency
Semantic role clustering
This paper seeks to determine to what extent there is cross-linguistic evidence for postulating clusters of predicate-specific semantic roles such as experiencer, cognizer, possessor, etc. For this, we survey non-default case assignments in a sample of 141 languages and annotate the associated predicates for cross-linguistically recurrent semantic roles, such as ‘the one who feels cold’, ‘the one who eats sth.’, ‘the thing that is being eaten’. W…
The Cambridge Handbook of Linguistic Anthropology
The field of linguistic anthropology looks at human uniqueness and diversity through the lens of language, our species' special combination of art and instinct. Human language both shapes, and is shaped by, our minds, societies, and cultural worlds. This state-of-the-field survey covers a wide range of topics, approaches and theories, such as the nature and function of language systems, the relationship between language and social interaction, an…
Decomposing hierarchical alignment
Apart from common cases of differential argument marking, referential hierarchies affect argument marking in two ways: (a) through hierarchical marking, where markers compete for a slot and the competition is resolved by a hierarchy, and (b) through co-argument sensitivity, where the marking of one argument depends on the properties of its co-argument. Here we show that while co-argument sensitivity cannot be analyzed in terms of hierarchical mar…
NP recursion over time
Linguistics (36 obras) · Philosophy (30 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (29 obras) · Computer Science (28 obras) · Psychology (20 obras) · Mathematics (16 obras) · Language and cultural evolution (15 obras) · Linguistic Variation and Morphology (15 obras) · Artificial Intelligence (14 obras) · Natural language processing (12 obras)