[1] She is Professor Emerita of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).
Thompson is known for her large body of research on Mandarin grammar, much of which she has conducted in collaboration with UCSB colleague Charles Li.
[7] That work, along with her earlier work in Chinese resultative verb compounds, was a major contribution to the study of Chinese morphosyntax, and stood apart from contemporary research in that it devoted attention to the internal structure of Chinese compound words, whereas other research focused on the syntactic nature of compound words.
[9] With Christian Matthiessen and Bill Mann she developed rhetorical structure theory.
[10] Her interest in discourse led her to be involved in collecting data for the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English.