Laura Michaelis


Laura A. Michaelis is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Background and Research

Laura Michaelis' research centers on the discourse-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 journals, including Language, Journal of Linguistics, Cognitive Science, Linguistics and Philosophy, Cognitive Linguistics, The Journal of Semantics and The Journal of Pragmatics. She is one of the founding editors of the Cambridge University Press journal . Her recent research focuses on idiomatic language and multi-word expressions, the grammar of English noun phrases, verbal argument structure, and nonstandard syntactic amalgams in conversational speech.She is currently writing a book about syntactic innovation and Construction Grammar.
She received her BA, MA and PhD in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, writing her thesis under the direction of Charles J. Fillmore.

Select Works

Books