Sandra A. Thompson

Sandra A. Thompson is an American linguist born July 6, 1941, and professor emerita of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 1986, having previously taught at UCLA from 1968 to 1986. Her research addresses discourse analysis, linguistic typology, and interactional linguistics, including her development of rhetorical structure theory and her extensive work on Mandarin Chinese grammar, most notably the widely cited 1981 reference grammar Mandarin Chinese, co-authored with Charles Li; she also documented the Wappo language and contributed to the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. She held 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 Life-Time Achievement Award in 2017.