Sandra Chung

Sandra Chung is Distinguished Professor Emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Chung has made contributions to the study of syntax and semantics. She has been dedicated to establishing that lesser-studied languages have as much to contribute to syntactic theory as do languages like English, French, and Italian. Her interests have shaped research on syntactic theory and Austronesian languages. The Austronesian languages -- some 1200 languages dispersed over a large area that includes the Pacific -- form one of the world's largest language families. 

Chung began doing fieldwork on Maori, Tongan, and Samoan (all languages of the South Pacific) as an undergraduate and on Indonesian as a graduate student. For decades, the main empirical focus of her research has been Chamorro, a language of the Mariana Islands. 

At UC Santa Cruz, Chung served as chair of the Linguistics Department (1994–97, 2013–16), chair of the Philosophy Department (2002–04), and Faculty Assistant to the Executive Vice Chancellor (2004–11). Chung earned her A.B. and Ph.D. at Harvard University, with a dissertation on the comparative syntax of Polynesian languages.