GATE Linguistics syllabus for Levels of Grammar and Grammatical Analysis | A. Phonetics and Phonology: Vocal tract anatomy; phonation; articulatory parameters; classification of sounds; gestural theory of speech production; cardinal vowels; secondary and coarticulation; suprasegmentals - length, stress, tone, intonation and juncture; IPA; basic physics of sound and phonation and articulation; acoustic cues for speech sounds; organisation of phones into phonemes; phoneme inventories and cross-linguistic properties; syllable structure and phonological properties; principles of phonological analysis - phonetic similarity, contrastive and complementary distribution, free variation, allophones; linear and non-linear approaches; levels of representation; phonological rules; distinctive features (major class, manner, place, etc.); feature geometry; rule ordering, markedness and unspecified featural values; core principles of lexical phonology, optimality theory, autosegmental phonology and prosodic morphology. B. Morphology: Concepts of morpheme, morph, allomorph, zero allomorph, conditions on allomorphs; lexeme and word; types of morphemes – structural and functional; affixes vs clitics; grammatical categories; morphological theories – generative, lexicalist, process and distributed morphology; identification of morphemes and parts of speech; alternation; morphophonology; inflection vs. derivation; conjugation and declension; word creation and word formation rules and processes; creativity and productivity, blocking, bracketing paradoxes, constraints on affix ordering; mental lexicon; lexical categories; valency changing operations. C. Syntax: Basic syntactic units and their types: word, phrase, clause, sentence and their description and generation; grammatical and case relations; key ideas from syntactic theories, Generative Grammars including Minimalist Program, HPSG, Relational Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar; phrase structure rules (including X-bar theory); universal grammar and cross-linguistic properties; idea of grammaticality judgements; solving the language acquisition problem; diagnostics of structure; syntactic phenomena such as movement, binding, ellipses, case-checking, islands, argument structure etc.; unergatives and unaccusatives. D. Semantics and Pragmatics: Types of meaning, lexical and compositional; syntax-semantics interface (semantic roles, binding, scope, LF etc.); sense and reference, connotation and denotation, lexical semantic relations (homonymy, hypo/hypernymy, antonymy, synonymy, ambiguity); prototype theory and componential analysis; sentence meaning and truth conditions, contradictions, entailment; basic set theory; propositions, truth values, sentential connectives; arguments, predicates, quantifiers, variables; in/definiteness, mood and modality; language use in context; sentence meaning and utterance meaning; speech acts; deixis; presupposition and implicature: Gricean maxims; information structure; politeness, power and solidarity; discourse analysis. |
