From 1968–1986, Thompson taught at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Since 1986, she has held a position at 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. Their 1981 book
Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar is widely cited and often compared to
Yuen Ren Chao's
A Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968). 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. She has also conducted research on discourse and grammar, collaborating with linguists such as
Paul Hopper on topics including
transitivity and
emergent grammar. With
Christian Matthiessen and
Bill Mann she developed
rhetorical structure theory. Her interest in discourse led her to be involved in collecting data for the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English. 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. == Honors and awards ==