and, in 1976, a Ph.D. at Harvard University, with a dissertation on the comparative syntax of Polynesian languages.
On the basis of Māori and Chamorro, she and William Ladusaw argued in Restriction and Saturation (MIT Press, 2003) that the number and kind of semantic combinatoric operations must be expanded beyond the typically assumed function application and abstraction.
[6][7] Her other theoretical work has addressed topics in agreement, predicate-initial word orders, wh-movement, ellipsis (especially sluicing), and on wh-agreement (where she demonstrated that Chamorro shows overt morphological cues to Wh-movement), among many others.
[8] She was invited to give a plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in 2008, where she spoke about combining primary (including documentary) research on understudied languages with theoretical linguistics, arguing that these two often competing interests can and should find a congenial home together.
[10] Chung was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2012.