About Me

Tajk'aneenek! My name is Jonah Bates and I am a teacher and linguist, and future principal, with an insatiable curiosity. Since Fall 2020, I have been teaching science at Van Horn High School in the Independence School District. I teach Zoology, Biology, Forensic Science, Earth Science, and Intro to Health Services, and also tutor Algebra, Geometry, Trig, Calculus, Physics and Chemistry. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to set up tutoring!

During the summers, I am a teacher and research mentor for the STAR 2.0 Program at the Children's Mercy Hospital Research Institute. It is an amazing 6-week intensive program for high schoolers to learn about and participate in biomedical research. Feel free to contact me for help applying. 

I received my MA and PhD in linguistics from the University of Kansas in 2020, and I also have a strong background in physics (BA 2012- MU), chemistry, biology, anthropology, and math.

My dissertation Typology and Analysis of Change in Person Marking Reference (PhD 2020 - KU) investigates diachronic change in the number, person, and clusivity reference of person markers across 10 language families and 430 languages. I track the trajectory of the shifts and posit that the causes for the observed directionality lie in the interaction between the markers' underlying semantic/syntactic architecture and the pragmatics of their use in discourse.