Current Proseminars

Proseminars are the special topics advanced graduate courses taught in our department, with course numbers in the 250 range. Typically these are prepared lecture courses given by faculty, but with strong student participation. They usually assume that enrollees will have already taken the core graduate courses in the relevant area.

This page reports proseminars being taught in the current academic year. We also include other graduate courses when their content has changed for the current offering. To view current academic year proseminar offerings, as well as the time and location, please go to the Linguistics Department’s Course Schedule page.

For an archive of old proseminar topics, please visit the archive page.

Winter 2025
LING 251A/B: Synchronic lenition and fortition

Jonah Katz

W, 10AM-12:50PM

This seminar will review the empirical properties of synchronic phonological patterns commonly referred to as ‘lenition’ (and sometimes its opposite ‘fortition’) and theoretical approaches to those patterns. Some of the major questions I anticipate exploring in the seminar include:

  • Is there any unity to the set of patterns referred to as ‘lenition’? In a phonological sense? A phonetic one?
  • How do lenition and fortition interact with systems of phonological contrast?
  • What are the constituent units over which lenition and fortition patterns must be described?
  • What are the major tenets of articulatory, auditory, and information-theoretic approaches to lenition? (How) can these approaches be distinguished empirically?

I anticipate the seminar will involve students preparing to present and lead discussion of primary research papers, as well as a final paper on a topic of the student’s choosing related to something we’ve discussed in class.

LING 252A/B: How dependencies accumulate

Tim Hunter and Ethan Poole

M, 1-3:50PM

The topic of this proseminar is constructions that allow for multiple dependencies of the same type to co-occur. Examining the ways in which dependencies can accumulate is a useful way to expose the limitations of certain formalisms; for example, the way center-embedding necessitates hierarchical rather than linear structure-building is an instance of this. In this proseminar, we will look for constructions that might allow us to make analogous discoveries about what kinds of additional mechanisms are required beyond plain hierarchical structure building (i.e. context-free grammars or tree-merging with finite categorization). The relevant phenomena we will look at include multiple-wh constructions, scrambling, Germanic verb clusters, and remnant movement.

All registered students will be expected to do the readings and to participate in discussion. 4-unit students will need to present a paper in class and to write a term paper. 2-unit students will only need to present a paper in class. Auditors are more than welcome.

LING 254A/B: Bayesian models of language learning

Laurel Perkins

R, 1-3:50PM

The goal is to explore how this particular approach to computational modeling can be used to answer questions about the roles that children’s hypothesis spaces and their experience with data play in the linguistic generalizations that they draw. We’ll start with an introduction of what Bayesian models are. We’ll then survey ways that these models have been applied to studying language learning across different linguistic domains, including sound, syntax, and meaning. Along the way we’ll aim to build an understanding of how Bayesian inference works, various techniques that can be used to apply it in different settings, and how this approach compares to other symbolic computational approaches to learning.

The only prerequisites are enthusiasm, and interest in taking a look at formal literature. We’ll cover all of the relevant math fundamentals as we go along. For students who’d like to do some hands-on exploring of these models, there will be opportunities to do so, but this isn’t a requirement. Here are the credit options:

(1) Students enrolled for 4 credits will need to: (i) participate in class; (ii) lead discussion on one paper; and (iii) either complete about 4 assignments that will involve playing around with math and programming, or write a final paper.

(2) Students enrolled for 2 credits will need to: (i) participate in class; and (ii) lead discussion on one paper.

LING 254A/B: Sociolinguistics: Analyzing language attitudes in spoken discourse

Astrid De Wit

T, 9-11:50AM

This course centers around a set of interviews with international students, in which they reflect on language attitudes with regard to various topics, including the global status of English and the role of the language for speakers of smaller languages, such as Dutch, the relative importance of speaking and writing “correctly”, and the status of formal and informal language use. These interviews are then analyzed from multiple sociolinguistic angles, thus unpeeling the power of language in a step-by-step fashion, going from the micro-analytic level to the more macro-analytic level.

We will start by adopting a conversation-analytic perspective and zoom in on the function of “the little things” (e.g. pauses and laughter), and then move on the analysis of discourse markers (e.g. you know, like, etc.), special grammatical constructions (such as passives to hide agentivity), and devices used for membership categorization.

The ultimate goal of this project is not only to collect and analyze linguistic attitudes but also to verify how they are constructed linguistically. With regard to methodological skills, students will learn how to conduct and transcribe sociolinguistic interviews and analyze data using tools such as AntConc.

Course evaluation will happen on the basis of an in-class presentation and a portfolio.

Dr. Astrid De Wit is an Associate Professor in English Linguistics at the University of Antwerp and the 2024-2025 Van Dyck Chair. The Van Dyck Chair is a distinguished visiting position based on an agreement between UCLA and the Flemish Interuniversity Council that allows the Council to send one visiting faculty per year to teach courses relevant to the selected Department. For AY 2024-2025, Professor De Wit will teach two courses in Linguistics – one graduate-level and one undergraduate-level – as part of this agreement.

Spring 2025
LING 251A/B: Phonology of global pop music

Kie Zuraw

W, 12-2:50PM

How can studying the phonology of pop songs from around the world inform our understanding of languages’ “regular” phonology? Can songs help us decide whether a language has stress? Or what features its tone system uses?

We’ll cover literature on topics such as, how lyrics are set to melodies in tone languages; how lyrics are set to rhythms in stress languages; musical evidence about prosodic units of language like moras and syllables; what rhymes; global trends in the phonology of pop music performance; and pop in different World Englishes.

In small groups (groups of size 1 are OK), we will develop projects over the course of the quarter that analyze some corpus of pop music to answer a phonological question–for some of you the corpus may be lyrics that you annotate by listening to the songs, for others it may be sheet music, and for some brave computational souls it may be the newer audio corpora. I’ll be doing a project too over the course of the quarter, looking at factors that influence how vowel hiatus is treated in the Spanish-language songs of one singer-songwriter.

You do not need to read music or know any music theory to take this course.

LING 252A/B: Meaning in fieldwork and typology

Jessica Rett

R, 1-3:50PM

This quarter, we’re going to examine how to determine the meaning of a morpheme, expression or utterance, and to avoid the hundreds of complications that arise. Some questions we will address include:

  • how can we test for whether an effect is syntactic or semantic?
  • how can we test for whether an effect is semantic or pragmatic?
  • what are the properties of different sorts of not-at-issue content?
  • how do we conduct cross-linguistic typologies?

While we will use Bochnak & Matthewson 2015 as a sort of textbook, the seminar will be very project-based; I will ask each student to spend most of the quarter working on some sort of elicitation (in one language, or typologically, in many). If you don’t come to me with a topic, I will have lots to suggest to you. But in this sense, the seminar will be conducted in part like a lab meeting.