Laura Michaelis

Last updated
Laura A. Michaelis
Laura Michaelis speaking in Israel.jpg
Alma mater University of California, Berkeley
Scientific career
Fields Linguistics
Institutions University of Colorado, Boulder
Doctoral advisor Charles J. Fillmore
Website www.colorado.edu/faculty/michaelis/

Laura A. Michaelis is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics [1] and a faculty fellow in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Contents

Background and research

She received her BA, MA and PhD (1993) in linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, writing her thesis under the direction of Charles J. Fillmore. [2]

Laura Michaelis' widely cited 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. [3] Her work has appeared in a variety of prestigious journals, including Language , Journal of Linguistics , Cognitive Science , Linguistics and Philosophy , Cognitive Linguistics, The Journal of Semantics and The Journal of Pragmatics .

Her recent research focuses on idiomatic language and multi-word expressions, the grammar of English noun phrases, verbal argument structure (Michaelis & Ruppenhofer 2001), [4] [5] nonstandard syntactic amalgams in conversational speech, syntactic innovation and Construction Grammar (Michaelis & Kim 2020).

Honors

In 2022, Michaelis was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. [6]

She is one of the founding editors of the Cambridge University Press journal Language and Cognition . [7]

Select works

Books

Other publications

Related Research Articles

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

In linguistics, syntax is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency), agreement, the nature of crosslinguistic variation, and the relationship between form and meaning (semantics). There are numerous approaches to syntax that differ in their central assumptions and goals.

Adele Eva Goldberg is an American linguist known for her development of construction grammar and the constructionist approach in the tradition of cognitive linguistics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Generative grammar</span> Theory in linguistics

Generative grammar, or generativism, is a linguistic theory that regards linguistics as the study of a hypothesised innate grammatical structure. It is a biological or biologistic modification of earlier structuralist theories of linguistics, deriving from logical syntax and glossematics. Generative grammar considers grammar as a system of rules that generates exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language. It is a system of explicit rules that may apply repeatedly to generate an indefinite number of sentences which can be as long as one wants them to be. The difference from structural and functional models is that the object is base-generated within the verb phrase in generative grammar. This purportedly cognitive structure is thought of as being a part of a universal grammar, a syntactic structure which is caused by a genetic mutation in humans.

Ivan Andrew Sag was an American linguist and cognitive scientist. He did research in areas of syntax and semantics as well as work in computational linguistics.

According to some linguistics theories, a stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are static, or unchanging throughout their entire duration, whereas dynamic verbs describe processes that entail change over time. Many languages distinguish between these two types in terms of how they can be used grammatically.

Construction grammar 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 language. Constructions include words, morphemes, fixed expressions and idioms, and abstract grammatical rules such as the passive voice or the ditransitive. Any linguistic pattern is considered to be a construction as long as some aspect of its form or its meaning cannot be predicted from its component parts, or from other constructions that are recognized to exist. In construction grammar, every utterance is understood to be a combination of multiple different constructions, which together specify its precise meaning and form.

In linguistics, coercion is a term applied to a process of reinterpretation triggered by a mismatch between the semantic properties of a selector and the semantic properties of the selected element. As Catalina Ramírez explains it, this phenomenon is called coercion because the process forces meaning into a lexical phrase where there is otherwise a discrepancy of the semantic aspects of the phrase. The term was first used in the semantic literature in 1988 by Marc Moens and Mark Steedman, who adopted it due to its "loose analogy with type-coercion in programming languages.” In his written framework of the generative lexicon, Pustejovsky (1995:111) defines coercion as "a semantic operation that converts an argument to the type which is expected by a function, where it would otherwise result in a type error."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles J. Fillmore</span> American linguist

Charles J. Fillmore was an American 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. Fillmore spent ten years at Ohio State University and a year as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University before joining Berkeley's Department of Linguistics in 1971. Fillmore was extremely influential in the areas of syntax and lexical semantics.

Richard Anthony Hudson FBA is a British linguist. He is best known for Word Grammar, a wide-ranging theory of syntax.

The double copula, also known as the reduplicative copula, double is or Isis, is the usage of two successive copulae when only one is necessary, largely in spoken English. For example:

Collostructional analysis is a family of methods developed by Stefan Th. Gries and Anatol Stefanowitsch. Collostructional analysis aims at measuring the degree of attraction or repulsion that words exhibit to constructions, where the notion of construction has so far been that of Goldberg's construction grammar.

Joan Wanda Bresnan FBA is Sadie Dernham Patek Professor in Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is best known as one of the architects of the theoretical framework of lexical functional grammar.

Stefan Th. Gries is (full) professor of linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Honorary Liebig-Professor of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen, and since 1 April 2018 also Chair of English Linguistics at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen.

Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural languages using formal tools from logic, mathematics and theoretical computer science. It is an interdisciplinary field, sometimes regarded as a subfield of both linguistics and philosophy of language. It provides accounts of what linguistic expressions mean and how their meanings are composed from the meanings of their parts. The enterprise of formal semantics can be thought of as that of reverse-engineering the semantic components of natural languages' grammars.

Georgia M. Green is an American linguist and academic. She is an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research has focused on pragmatics, speaker intention, word order and meaning. She has been an advisory editor for several linguistics journals or publishers and she serves on the usage committee for the American Heritage Dictionary.

Dr. Lisa Green is a linguist specializing in syntax and African American English (AAE). She is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. In July 2020 she was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor.

The usage-based linguistics is a linguistics approach within a broader functional/cognitive framework, that emerged since the late 1980s, and that assumes a profound relation between linguistic structure and usage. It challenges the dominant focus, in 20th century linguistics, on considering language as an isolated system removed from its use in human interaction and human cognition. Rather, usage-based models posit that linguistic information is expressed via context-sensitive mental processing and mental representations, which have the cognitive ability to succinctly account for the complexity of actual language use at all levels. Broadly speaking, a usage-based model of language accounts for language acquisition and processing, synchronic and diachronic patterns, and both low-level and high-level structure in language, by looking at actual language use.

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Verbs come in three tenses: past, present, and future. The past is used to describe things that have already happened. The present tense is used to describe things that are happening right now, or things that are continuous. The future tense describes things that have yet to happen.

In linguistics, the syntax–semantics interface is the interaction between syntax and semantics. Its study encompasses phenomena that pertain to both syntax and semantics, with the goal of explaining correlations between form and meaning. Specific topics include scope, binding, and lexical semantic properties such as verbal aspect and nominal individuation, semantic macroroles, and unaccusativity.

References

  1. "Faculty". Department of Linguistics. 2014-08-05. Retrieved 2022-03-15.
  2. "Toward a grammar of aspect: the case of the English perfect construction | Linguistics". lx.berkeley.edu. Retrieved 2022-03-15.
  3. "Laura A. Michaelis". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2022-03-15.
  4. Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  5. Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  6. "Linguistic Society of America List of Fellows by Year" . Retrieved 11 March 2022.
  7. "Editorial Board - Language and Cognition".