Laura A. Michaelis

Laura A. Michaelis is a Professor of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science. She is a founding editor of the journal Language and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Language and Cognitive Science and has co-authored a major textbook on English syntax within the Sign-Based Construction Grammar framework.

Her educational background is not explicitly detailed in the provided texts, but her academic affiliations and leadership roles reflect a distinguished career in linguistics.

Michaelis specializes in Construction Grammar, the tense-aspect interface, corpus syntax, syntactic innovation, and the semantics of aspectual constructions across languages. Her research bridges cognitive and formal linguistics, with a focus on how grammatical constructions encode meaning in context. She has explored non-prototypical uses of aspectual markers and contributed to cross-linguistic and diachronic studies of temporal expressions.

While no specific recent publications are listed in the provided content, her scholarly output centers on theoretical and empirical investigations into syntactic constructions, particularly through the lens of construction grammar, with implications for cognitive science and discourse analysis.

• Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (2022)
• Boulder Faculty Excellence in Research Award (2022)
• Charles J. Fillmore Professor at the 2025 LSA Linguistic Institute

Michaelis has been instrumental in mentoring students and advancing the field through academic service. She co-organized the international workshops Beyond Time: Unifying Temporal and Non-temporal Uses of Aspectual Constructions (2017) and Beyond Time 2 (2020), fostering interdisciplinary dialogue. She also delivered a keynote at the Tenth International Conference on Construction Grammar (ICCG-10) in Paris. Her leadership in organizing scholarly events and editorial work reflects her active engagement in the academic community and commitment to advancing linguistic research.

She is involved with the Institute of Cognitive Science at CU Boulder and has led research initiatives funded by campus programs, emphasizing interdisciplinary collaboration. Her work continues to influence both theoretical and applied dimensions of syntax and semantics.