CU Linguistics Professor and chair Laura Michaelis is the co-author of a new English syntax textbook, Syntactic Construction of English (Cambridge UP, 2020). The book takes a novel approach to the study of sentence structures. It is the first formal syntax textbook based on Construction Grammar, a theoretical framework that Prof. Michaelis helped to develop, and the first to explain concepts primarily with real English sentences from text corpora. Michaelis and co-author Jong-Bok Kim (Kyung Hee University) wanted to create a textbook that would be accessible and engaging for readers globally, and target formulaic language and idioms that are often daunting for English learners. Michaelis says, “My advisor was Chuck Fillmore at Berkeley and JB’s advisor was Ivan Sag at Stanford, so the book is a combination of their approaches which is infused with insights from our brilliant teachers. And because JB teaches at a Korean university, the book was shaped by the very different context in which he teaches the structure of English”.