Laura Michaelis
Professor and Department Chair
Linguistics

Office: LBB 120/437

Laura A. Michaelis is a cognitive-functional syntactician and semanticist specializing in the tense-aspect interface, corpus syntax, syntactic innovation, lexical semantics, the discourse-syntax interface, semantic change and Latin syntax and semantics. She is also one of the leading developers of Construction Grammar, a syntactic theory that represents the grammar of a language as a structured inventory of patterns ranging from the highly schematic to the very specific. She is the author (with Jongbok Kim) of a 2020 textbook on Construction Grammar, Syntactic Constructions of English (Cambridge). Her work has appeared in the journals Language, Studies in Language, Journal of LinguisticsLinguistics and Philosophy, Journal of Semantics, Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics. She is one of the founding editors of the interdisciplinary journal Language and Cognition, published by Cambridge University Press. She teaches a range of courses, from graduate-level syntax and semantics to CLAS/LING 1010, a cross-listed undergraduate course on the structure of English words. She has held visiting scholar appointments at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute and Cambridge University. She received her PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Charles J. Fillmore. She is a 2022 Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America, a 2022 recipient of the Boulder Faculty Assembly's Excellence in Research award and a 2022 recipient of the Graduate School's Outstanding Faculty Mentor award. She is a Faculty Fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science.