Laura Michaelis

Laura Michaelis is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Colorado Boulder and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science. She is a leading scholar in Construction Grammar and cognitive-functional linguistics, with research spanning syntax, semantics, corpus analysis, and discourse pragmatics.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley (1993), supervised by Charles J. Fillmore. She has been a faculty member at CU Boulder since 1993.

Her research focuses on the interface between syntax and meaning, particularly through the lens of Construction Grammar. She investigates tense and aspect, syntactic innovation, corpus-based patterns, and the ideological use of syntax. She has co-developed the framework of Social Semiotic Syntax, linking grammatical structures to ideological and moral worldviews. Her work combines theoretical rigor with empirical data from corpora and psycholinguistics.

Her publications include the textbook Syntactic Constructions in English (2020, Cambridge) and articles in top journals such as Language, Cognition, and Cognitive Linguistics. She is a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Language and Cognition.

She has received several prestigious honors:

• Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America (2022)
• Boulder Faculty Excellence in Research Award (2022)
• CU Graduate School Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award (2022–2023)

Michaelis has advised or co-advised 11 PhD students and currently mentors five doctoral candidates. Her students work on diverse topics including corpus-based syntax and semantics across languages such as Arapaho, Vietnamese, Basque, Mandarin, and Modern Standard Arabic. She teaches courses ranging from graduate-level syntax and semantics to undergraduate courses on English word structure.

She has held visiting scholar positions at UC Berkeley’s International Computer Science Institute and Cambridge University. Her recent work explores how syntactic choices reflect and reinforce ideological positions, particularly in political discourse.