Rate My Professor Sandra A. Thompson

Sandra A. Thompson is Research Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her BA in linguistics from Ohio State University in 1963, her MA in linguistics in 1965, and her PhD in linguistics in 1969 from the same university. Thompson commenced her professional career at the University of California, Los Angeles, serving on the faculty there from 1968 to 1986. In 1986, she joined the Department of Linguistics at UCSB, where she held positions leading to her current emerita status.

Thompson's research centers on interactional linguistics, exploring the role of everyday embodied conversational interactions in shaping morphosyntactic and prosodic patterns that constitute grammar. She prioritizes cross-linguistic as well as language-specific investigations demonstrating how grammatical patterns emerge from the demands of ordinary talk-in-interaction. Her primary language areas are Mandarin Chinese, Wappo—a now-extinct language isolate from northern California—and English. She has also worked with Japanese, Korean, and Hmong. Interactional linguistics, her specialization, intersects with conversation analysis to address how social interactions motivate phonological, prosodic, semantic, and morphosyntactic structures. Thompson serves as Associate Editor of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English, a key resource for studying natural spoken language.

Among her major publications are Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (1981, co-authored with Charles N. Li), A Reference Grammar of Wappo (2006, co-authored with Joseph Sung-Yul Park and Charles N. Li), and Grammar in Everyday Talk: Building Responsive Actions (2015, co-authored with Barbara A. Fox and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen). She co-edited Interaction and Grammar (1996, with Elinor Ochs and Emanuel A. Schegloff). Her extensive body of work has amassed over 23,000 citations, underscoring her substantial impact on the fields of linguistics and discourse analysis.

Thompson has been honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988, served as President of the International Pragmatics Association from 1991 to 1994, was elected a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2007, and received the John J. Gumperz Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Pragmatics Association in 2017.