By Scott Rappaport
UC Santa Cruz professor of linguistics Sandra Chung will deliver the 51st annual Faculty Research Lecture on Tuesday, February 7, at 7 p.m. at the Music Recital Hall in the Performing Arts Complex.
The annual Faculty Research Lecture is the foremost academic research honor bestowed by the UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate.
Chung will speak on the topic “Language Through the Lens of Diversity.”
Trained in linguistics at Harvard University, Chung’s research focuses on syntax and semantics, and her contributions are empirical as well as theoretical. Her work helps explain similarities and differences of word order and agreement across languages, and their implications for communication and meaning.
“My two fields are syntactic theory and Austronesian languages–a family of some 1,200 languages dispersed over a vast area that includes the Pacific,” said Chung. “I’ve spent most of my academic life studying the structure of a very few of these languages: Maori, Samoan, Tongan, Indonesian, and especially Chamorro.”