Laura A. Michaelis is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

in the Department of

Linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the

University of Colorado Boulder The University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder, CU, or Colorado) is a public research university in Boulder, Colorado, United States. Founded in 1876, five months before Colorado became a state, it is the flagship university of the University o ...

Background and research

She received her BA, MA and PhD (1993) in

linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, writing her thesis under the direction of

Charles J. Fillmore Charles J. Fillmore (August 9, 1929 – February 13, 2014) was an American linguistics, linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan in 1961 ...

. Laura Michaelis' widely cited research centers on the

discourse Discourse is a generalization of the notion of a conversation to any form of communication. Discourse is a major topic in social theory, with work spanning fields such as sociology, anthropology, continental philosophy, and discourse analysis. F ...

-syntax interface in conversational English and the semantic interaction between words and grammatical constructions, with particular emphasis on the linguistic encoding of tense and aspect. Her work has appeared in a variety of prestigious journals, including ''

Language Language is a structured system of communication that consists of grammar and vocabulary. It is the primary means by which humans convey meaning, both in spoken and signed language, signed forms, and may also be conveyed through writing syste ...

'', ''

Journal of Linguistics The ''Journal of Linguistics'' is a triannual peer-reviewed academic journal covering all branches of theoretical linguistics and the official publication of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain. It is published by Cambridge University Pr ...

'', ''

Cognitive Science Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition (in a broad sense). Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include percep ...

'', ''

Linguistics and Philosophy ''Linguistics and Philosophy'' is a peer-reviewed journal which publishes work addressing meaning and structure in natural language. It is one of four top journals in formal semantics, alongside Natural Language Semantics, the Journal of Semanti ...

'', ''Cognitive Linguistics'', ''The Journal of Semantics'' and ''The

Journal of Pragmatics The ''Journal of Pragmatics'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering the linguistic subfield of pragmatics. It was established in 1977 by Jacob L. Mey (at that time Odense University) and Hartmut Haberland (Roskilde University). The ...

''. Her recent research focuses on idiomatic language and multi-word expressions, the grammar of English

noun phrases A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently ...

, verbal

argument structure In logic, the logical form of a statement is a precisely specified semantic version of that statement in a formal system. Informally, the logical form attempts to formalize a possibly ambiguous statement into a statement with a precise, unambig ...

(Michaelis & Ruppenhofer 2001), nonstandard syntactic amalgams in conversational speech, syntactic innovation and

Construction Grammar Construction grammar (often abbreviated CxG) is a family of theories within the field of cognitive linguistics which posit that constructions, or learned pairings of linguistic patterns with meanings, are the fundamental building blocks of human ...

(Michaelis & Kim 2020).

Honors

In 2022, Michaelis was inducted as a

Fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

of the

Linguistic Society of America The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) is a learned society for the field of linguistics. Founded in New York City in 1924, the LSA works to promote the scientific study of language. The society publishes three scholarly journals: ''Language'', ...

. She is one of the founding editors of the

Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press was the university press of the University of Cambridge. Granted a letters patent by King Henry VIII in 1534, it was the oldest university press in the world. Cambridge University Press merged with Cambridge Assessme ...

journal '' Language and Cognition''.

Select works

Books

* ''Syntactic Constructions in English'' (w/ Jongbok Kim) Cambridge University Press (2020) *''Mismatch: Form-Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar'' (w/ Elaine J. Francis) CSLI Publications (2003) * ''Beyond Alternations: A Constructional Model of the Applicative Construction in German'' (w/ Josef Ruppenhofer) CSLI Publications (2001) * ''Aspectual Grammar and Past-Time Reference''. Routledge (1998)

Other publications

* Michaelis, Laura A. 2011
Stative by Construction
''Linguistics'' 49: 1359–1399 * Michaelis, Laura A. 2006. Time and Tense. In B. Aarts and A. MacMahon, (eds.), ''The Handbook of English Linguistics.'' Oxford: Blackwell. 220-234. * Brenier, Jason M. and Laura A. Michaelis. 2005. Optimization via Syntactic Amalgam: Syntax-Prosody Mismatch and Copula Doubling. ''Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory'' 1: 45-88. * Michaelis, Laura A. 2005. Entity and Event Coercion in a Symbolic Theory of Syntax. In J.-O. Oestman and M. Fried, (eds.), ''Construction Grammar(s): Cognitive Grounding and Theoretical Extensions. Constructional Approaches to Language'', Volume 3. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 45-88. * Michaelis, Laura A. 2004. Type Shifting in Construction Grammar: An Integrated Approach to Aspectual Coercion. ''Cognitive Linguistics'' 15: 1-67.

References

External links

University of Colorado bio

Personal website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Michaelis, Laura A. Linguists from the United States American women linguists University of California, Berkeley alumni University of Colorado Boulder faculty Living people Fellows of the Linguistic Society of America American academic journal editors 1964 births