[1][2] Chappell graduated from the Australian National University in 1978 with first-class honours in Asia Studies and went on to pursue a PhD at the same institution, awarded in 1984 for a thesis entitled “A semantic analysis of passive, causative and dative constructions in standard Chinese”.
[1] Between 2009 and 2013 she held an ERC Advanced Grant for her project SINOTYPE on the hybrid syntactic typology of Sinitic languages.
[4] Between 2015 and 2017 she held a visiting position as a high-level foreign specialist at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, funded by the Chinese Ministry of Education.
[3] Chappell has worked on various topics in the synchrony and diachrony of the Sinitic languages, particularly from the perspective of grammaticalization and linguistic typology.
Her work on object-marking constructions is based on evidence from over 600 Chinese dialects, and she has carried out extensive fieldwork on the Xianghua language of Hunan province.