Laura A. Michaelis (Fillmore Professor)
University of Colorado Boulder
Laura A. Michaelis is Professor and Chair of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder, and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science. She received her PhD in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Charles J. Fillmore. She is a cognitive-functional syntactician and semanticist specializing in the tense-aspect interface, corpus syntax, syntactic innovation, lexical semantics, and the discourse-syntax interface. She is one of the developers of Sign-based 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. With Jongbok Kim, she co-authored a 2020 textbook on Construction Grammar, Syntactic Constructions of English (CUP). She is one of the founding editors of the CUP interdisciplinary journal Language and Cognition, also published by CUP. Her work has appeared in the journals Language, Studies in Language, Journal of Linguistics, Linguistics & Philosophy, Journal of Semantics, Cognition and Cognitive Linguistics. She is a 2022 Fellow of the LSA, a 2022 recipient of the Boulder Faculty Assembly's Excellence in Research award and a 2022 recipient of the CU Boulder Graduate School's Outstanding Faculty Mentor award. In current work, she is examining syntactic aspects of climate change discourse.