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.

2025-26 proseminar information will be posted here once the information is available.

Winter 2026

LING 252: Topics in Syntax and Semantics

Dylan Bumford

T, 9-11:50AM

LING 254: Explanations for sentence processing

Jack Duff

MW, 10-11:50AM

Research on human sentence processing has provided us with many generalizations about incremental comprehension: we often map input to meaning greedily, predictively, noisily, etc. Why does the sentence processor work like this, and not in some other way? In this seminar, we will review a variety of literature with this goal of explanation. In parallel with classic and modern studies in sentence processing, we will explore how this problem shape arises in general cognitive science, with special focus on approaches to skill learning and resource-rationality. Students with a focus outside sentence processing are very welcome; depending on attendees, we may also turn our attention toward related questions in theories of linguistic competence.