Title
Associate Professor

Department
Dept of Linguistics


Faculty URL
http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~jenks/index.html

Email
jenks@berkeley.edu


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Research Expertise and Interest
syntax, semantics, morphology, linguistic theory, Thai, sudanese languages, African languages, Southeast Asian languages

Research Description
The possible words, sentences, and meanings that are expressible in human language vary widely, but within a relatively well constraint space of possibilities. For example, many languages mark definiteness with separate words, such as English 'the', while others mark it with affixes and other languages do not mark definiteness at all.?
His?primary area of specialization is syntax and its interfaces. He?teaches courses on syntax, semantics, typology, and fieldwork.
Much of his work examines languages from East and Southeast Asia and Subsaharan Africa.?
For over ten years he has been working on Moro, an endangered Kordofanian language spoken in the Nuba Mountains of Sudan. He?co-developed the Moro Story Corpus, and he is currently collaborating on a descriptive grammar of Moro as well.