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.

2026-27 proseminar information will be posted here once the information is available.

Fall 2026

LING 251: Stress and structure

Jonah Katz & Claire Moore Cantwell

R, 2-4:50 PM

We will explore how word stress is represented, beginning with theoretical arguments, and progressing to attempts to probe the psychological reality of those structures with experiments. We’ll cover phonetic results as well as behavioral and neurological results, and we’ll also spend quite a bit of time discussing experimental methods for probing stress, and how we could expand on those, or develop novel methods, to test aspects of stress representation that have not been (fully) examined previously.

LING 252: Topics in conditional composition

Dylan Bumford & Yael Sharvit

T, 2-4:50 PM

This semantics proseminar will be about conditionals that are not well-behaved, where “well-behaved” will be defined somewhat arbitrarily based on unexpected interactions with other logical elements.

LING 253: Linguistic phylogenetics

David Goldstein

W, 9-11:50 AM

This quarter I’ll be teaching a proseminar on linguistic phylogenetics (Ling 253), which will focus on methods for inferring a phylogenetic tree for a set of languages that share a common ancestor. We will also cover a number of ancillary topics including rates of linguistic change, model selection, and correlated evolution.

We will start with a quick tour of traditional methods of linguistic subgrouping, and then spend the rest of the quarter on statistical phylogenetics, i.e., maximum likelihood and Bayesian-MCMC methods. For maximum likelihood inference, we’ll use R. For Bayesian inference, we’ll use RevBayes.

No prior experience with these tools or with linguistic phylogenetics is required or assumed.

Winter 2027

LING 251: Topics in Phonetics and Phonology

Kie Zuraw

T, 9-11:50 AM

LING 254: Topics in Linguistics

Tim Hunter & Laurel Perkins

M, 2-4:50 PM

Spring 2027

LING 252: Topics in Syntax and Semantics

Harold Torrence

M, 1-3:50PM