[2] After completing her BA and MA degree at the University of Toronto, Cheng obtained her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991, where she studied with Noam Chomsky.
In 2012, she was nominated for the Regional Chair at the University of Nantes (France), where she was appointed for two years and lectured on East Asian Linguistics .
[5] Cheng has done extensive work on theoretical syntax, mostly from a comparative perspective, with the majority of her work concentrating on Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu, and Min) and Bantu languages (Zulu, Chichewa, Bemba).
[6] Important contributions of her work to syntactic theory include her “Clausal Typing Hypothesis” (Cheng 1991), which led to a better understanding of the nature of triggers of operations in syntax, and the role that sentence final particles play in the triggering system.
Furthermore, this work has demonstrated that bare nouns can have hidden structures, and that classifiers can be associated with definiteness.