She received a B.A. in English from the University of Massachusetts at Boston in 1990, and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland in 1996. Dr. Thompson's primary research interests are in syntactic theory, syntax/semantics interface, and the theory of speech errors. Her research in linguistic theory focuses on investigation of the structure of Universal Grammar, the component of language which is innate and specific to human beings. Since the groundbreaking work of Noam Chomsky in the 1950's, researchers in generative grammar have sought to discover the abstract properties of the components of human language - the sound system, the structure of words and sentences, and the system of meaning. Thompson's work contributes to that discussion by examining the interplay between syntax and semantics. She has argued that general principles regulating the relationship between form and meaning in natural language guide the mapping of syntax to semantics in the domain of temporal interpretation.
As well as a theory of the universal properties of language, the science of linguistics seeks to provide an analysis of the limited ways in which human languages differ from each other structurally. Thompson's research in spontaneous speech errors contributes to this project by examining the patterns of errors exhibited by speakers of different languages. Thompson argues that the behavior cross-linguistically of verbal inflectional morphology in speech errors provides evidence for the claim that in certain languages, main and auxiliary verbs are structurally indistinct, whereas in other languages, such as English, main and auxiliary verbs are derived in distinct ways.
Thompson's research has been published in leading linguistics journals , as well as in books, working papers and proceedings. She teaches courses in the structure of English, syntactic theory, morphology, semantics, and speech errors.
In “Time in Natural Language: Syntactic Interfaces with Semantics and Discourse", Thompson argues that although the structural and morphological reflexes of temporal interpretation do not seem to be overtly evident in languages such as English in the way that they apparently are in languages such as Irish and Russian, English does in fact show the same systematic structural and semantic generalizations regarding the interpretation of time as other languages. Thompson captures this by claiming that the mapping from structure to meaning in time interpretation is specified in Universal Grammar, and explores the consequences of such a theory for analyses of temporal and aspectual dependencies.
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