Sandra A. Thompson

Sandra A. Thompson is a Research Professor Emerita at the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), within the College of Letters and Science. Her research focuses on Interactional Linguistics, examining how everyday conversational interactions shape grammatical and prosodic patterns across languages. She specializes in Mandarin Chinese, Wappo (an extinct language isolate), Japanese, Korean, Hmong, and English.

Her work interrogates the social and cognitive dimensions of grammar, questioning traditional linguistic categories through the lens of interactional data. Key research themes include the emergence of grammatical units from social interaction, the role of turn-taking in linguistic structure, and the cross-linguistic analysis of morphosyntactic patterns.

No scientific awards or grants are explicitly listed in the provided text. She has advised no formally documented students, and no specific lab affiliations are mentioned.