Sandy Chung, UC Santa Cruz, is committed to the idea that lesser-studied languages have as much to contribute to syntactic theory as do languages like English, French, and Italian. These interests have shaped her research on syntactic theory and Austronesian languages. Chung began doing fieldwork on Maori, Tongan, and Samoan (all languages of the South Pacific) as an undergraduate. As a graduate student, she did fieldwork on Indonesian. Since 1977, the main empirical focus of her research has been Chamorro, a language of the Mariana Islands.

She is still (slowly) making progress on the Chamorro reference grammar Chung has been writing since 2009. Currently, she is collaborating with Dr. Elizabeth D. Rechebei, Manuel F. Borja, Tita A. Hocog, and many others in the CNMI on a revision of the Chamorro-English Dictionary. Finally, since 2011, Matt Wagers, Manuel F. Borja, and Chung have been collaborating on psycholinguistic research on Chamorro in the Mariana Islands.

For More information: https://linguistics.ucsc.edu/news-events/colloquia/index.html