The question of how grammars of language come to be the way they are is one of the most fundamental questions that linguists can be concerned with. My research interests center around the role of discourse, especially everyday embodied conversational interactions, in shaping morphosyntactic and prosodic patterns, an area known as Interactional Linguistics. I place a premium on cross-linguistic as well as language-specific investigations of how grammatical patterns can be seen as emergent from the exigencies of ordinary talk-in-interaction. My primary language areas are Mandarin Chinese, Wappo (a now-extinct language isolate of northern California), and English. I have also worked with Japanese, Korean, and Hmong.

Interactional Linguistics specifically seeks to explain how everyday social interactions motivate the phonological, prosodic, semantic, and morphosyntactic patterns we call ‘grammar’. Interactional Linguistics intersects directly with the study of conversation, particularly Conversation Analysis, and considers such questions as

• how does looking at language in use affect what we understand grammar to be?
• how can we understand grammar as being both cognitive and social?
• how does the sequential, temporal nature of everyday interactions influence the way speakers store, access, and retrieve their experience with language?
• what are the categories and units of grammar? Which of the ones we’ve grown up on, and been trained to see, would we see if we looked at just interactional data?
• do everyday social interactions provide support for traditional grammatical categories like ‘nouns’, ‘verbs’, ‘adjectives’, ‘sentences’, ‘clauses’, ‘question intonation’, ‘passive’, etc.? Or do we need new grammatical ‘units’?
• how do the categories and units of grammar arise from recognized patterns in the way social interaction is organized?
• does grammar really have anything to do with ‘taking turns’?

The linguistics faculty at UCSB combine expertise in many specific languages and language areas, as well as in grammar, semantics, discourse, phonetics, phonology, language change, sociocultural linguistics, and psycholinguistics. We have a congenial and extremely active and productive faculty who share a common vision of what it means to do linguistics.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Thompson, Sandra A., and Paul J. Hopper. 2001. Transitivity, Clause Structure, and Argument Structure: Evidence from Conversation. In Joan L. Bybee and Paul J. Hopper, eds., Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 27-60.

Ford, Cecilia E., Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson. 2002. Constituency and the Grammar of Turn Increments. In Cecilia E. Ford, Barbara A. Fox, and Sandra A. Thompson, eds., The Language of Turn and Sequence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 14-38.

Thompson, Sandra A. 2002. "Object complements" and Conversation: Towards a Realistic Account, Studies in Language 26.1: 125 164. [Translated as: Hacia una explicación de los "complementos objeto" y la conversación, in Mercedes Sedano, Adriana Bolivar y Martha Shiro, eds., 2006, Haciendo Lingüística Homenaje a Paola Bentivoglio. Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela.]

Thompson, Sandra A., and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen. 2005. The Clause as a Locus of Grammar and Interaction, Discourse Studies 7.4-5: 481-505. [Reprinted in Language and Linguistics 6.4: 807-837.]

Thompson, Sandra A., Joseph Sung-Yul Park, and Charles N. Li. 2006. A Reference Grammar of Wappo. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CURRENT PROJECTS

• Projectability and Clause Combining in Interaction: complementation, relative clauses
• Japanese (w)atashi/ore/boku 'I': They're Not Just Pronouns (with Tsuyoshi Ono)
• A Linguistic Practice for Retracting Overstatements: Concessive Repair (with Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen)
• The Clause as a Locus of Grammar and Interaction (with Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen)
• 'You know, it's funny': English 'extraposition' revisited (with Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen)

COURSES TAUGHT

• Linguistics 109/209: Introduction to syntax
• Linguistics 214: Discourse
• Linguistics 234: Advanced syntax
• Linguistics 252A-B: Seminar in Morphology and Syntax
  – Recent seminar topics: Argument Structure and Transitivity, The Clause
• Linguistics 254A-B: Seminar in Discourse
  – Recent seminar topic: Constructions and Discourse