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Laura Michaelis

I am a Professor of Linguistics in the  at the  and a Faculty Fellow in the . In addition, I was a founding editor of the Cambridge University Press journal . I am the author, with Jong Bok Kim, of a Construction-Grammar-based syntax textbook (2020; Cambridge). 

My research specializations include the tense-aspect interface, corpus syntax, syntactic innovation, aspectual meaning in typological perspective, the discourse-syntax interface, etymology and Latin syntax and semantics. I am a proponent and developer of , 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.

 

Syntactic Constructions
"Adopting the traditional perspective that constructions are at the heart of the grammar of English and other languages, Kim and Michaelis provide a detailed introduction to English syntax within the Sign-Based Construction Grammar framework (SBCG). They consider all the main syntactic phenomena of English, and in each area consider both what is assumed and why it is assumed. The book is a valuable addition to textbooks on English syntax. Anyone who learns about syntax from it will end up with considerable knowledge both of English syntax and of the SBCG framework." Bob Borsley, Emeritus Professor, Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex