Research and Teaching
Problem-solving and linguistic argumentation have always appealed
to me. There's something I find deeply satisfying about
discovering new evidence for an analysis or bringing new evidence to
bear on a theoretical claim. I also enjoy doing linguistic fieldwork. And
I'm 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 my 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. I began doing fieldwork
on Maori, Tongan, and Samoan (all languages of the South Pacific) as an
undergraduate. As a graduate student, I also did fieldwork on
Indonesian. Since 1977, the main empirical focus of my research has been
Chamorro, a language of the Mariana Islands. My fieldwork on Chamorro
takes me regularly to Saipan. Some of the questions
I've investigated: How is verb-first word order derived? What is the
best way to understand ergativity? What accounts for wh-agreement -- the special
morphological agreement found in questions and relative clauses
in some languages, -- and what does this agreement reveal about the
syntax of displacement?
Check the Publications page for a link to my Chamorro grammar, which is posted on eScholarship, the University of California's open access publication platform.
Since 2008, I've been 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. See the Chamorro Links page for links to (a) a web version of most of the edited Dictionary entries, and (b) an English-Chamorro Finder List compiled from the Dictionary database.
I'm a fifth-generation Chinese American, a native Californian who was raised as a monolingual English speaker, and a proud alumna of Berkeley High School.
Photo by M. Wagers of Sandy awaiting her appointment at the NMI Parole Board, September 2013; photos of Rota and Saipan, September 2013 and July 2009. Last updated: January 2025.