Thompson received her BA in linguistics from Ohio State University in 1963. She earned her MA in linguistics in 1965 and her PhD in 1969,[3] both from Ohio State.[4]
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. Their 1981 book Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar[6] is widely cited and often compared to Yuen Ren Chao's A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968).[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.[8]
Thompson and Charles Li also carried out extensive documentation of the Wappo language, and, with Joseph Sung-yul Park, published a reference grammar of the language in 2006.[12]
Thompson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988.[13] She was President of the International Pragmatics Association from 1991-1994.[14] She was named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2007.[15] In 2017, she was given the International Pragmatics Association's John J. Gumperz Life-Time Achievement Award at the 15th International Pragmatics Conference in Belfast.[16] A volume of essays in her honor was published in 2002.[17] The book Building Responsive Action written together with Barbara Fox and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen received the best book award from the International Society for Conversation Analysis in 2018.[18]
^Packard, Jerome (1997). "Introduction." New Approaches to Chinese Word Formation: Morphology, Phonology and the Lexicon in Modern and Ancient Chinese. In Trends in Linguistics: Studies and Monographs 105, ed. Werner Winter. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 17–18.
^Mann, William C., Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen and Sandra A. Thompson (1992). Rhetorical Structure Theory and Text Analysis. Discourse Description: Diverse linguistic analyses of a fund-raising text . ed. by W. C. Mann and S. A. Thompson. Amsterdam, John Benjamins: 39–78.
^Thompson, Sandra A. (2006). A reference grammar of Wappo. Park, Joseph Sung-Yul., Li, Charles N., 1940-. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN9780520916104. OCLC806056314.
^Bybee, Joan L.; Noonan, Michael, eds. (2002). Complex Sentences in Grammar and Discourse: Essays in honor of Sandra A. Thompson. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ISBN9789027297150. OCLC70765498.