Includes phonetics, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics, aimed at candidates studying the scientific structure and evolution of languages.

GATE Humanities and Social Sciences - Linguistics

Official 2025 syllabus extracted from https://gate2025.iitr.ac.in/doc/2025/GATE%20_XH-C3_2025_Syllabus.pdf

Language and Linguistics

Language: spoken, written and signed

Description and prescription

Language and cultural heritage

Language and social identity

Language structure, units and components

Design features

Writing systems

Biological foundations and language faculty

Linguistic competence and performance

Levels of grammar

Contrast and complementation

Context dependent and context free rules

Levels of adequacy for analysis

Interdisciplinary approaches

Schools of linguistic thought: European, American

Indian Grammatical Tradition

Levels of Grammar and Grammatical Analysis

Vocal tract anatomy, phonation

Articulatory parameters

Classification of sounds

Gestural theory of speech production

Cardinal vowels

Secondary and co-articulation

Suprasegmentals: length, stress, tone, intonation, juncture

Basic physics of sound

Acoustic cues for speech sounds

Organisation of phones into phonemes

Phoneme inventories and cross-linguistic properties

Syllable structure

Principles of phonological analysis

Phonetic similarity, contrastive and complementary distribution, free variation, allophones

Linear and non-linear approaches

Phonological rules

Distinctive features (major class, manner, place)

Feature geometry

Rule ordering, markedness, unspecified features

Lexical phonology, optimality theory, autosegmental phonology, prosodic morphology

Phonetics and Phonology

Morpheme, morph, allomorph, zero allomorph

Lexeme and word

Structural and functional morphemes

Affixes vs clitics

Grammatical categories

Morphological theories: generative, lexicalist, process, distributed

Identification of morphemes and parts of speech

Alternation

Morphophonology

Inflection vs derivation

Conjugation and declension

Word formation rules and processes

Creativity and productivity, blocking, bracketing paradoxes

Constraints on affix ordering

Mental lexicon

Lexical categories

Valency changing operations

Morphology

Basic syntactic units: word, phrase, clause, sentence

Grammatical and case relations

Generative grammars: Minimalist Program, HPSG, Relational Grammar, LFG

Phrase structure rules including X-bar theory

Universal grammar and cross-linguistic properties

Grammaticality judgements

Language acquisition problem

Diagnostics of structure

Syntactic phenomena: movement, binding, ellipses, case-checking, islands, argument structure

Unergatives and unaccusatives

Syntax

Types of meaning: lexical and compositional

Syntax-semantics interface: semantic roles, binding, scope, LF

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

Definiteness, mood and modality

Sentence meaning and utterance meaning

Speech acts, deixis

Presupposition and implicature, Gricean maxims

Information structure

Politeness, power and solidarity

Discourse analysis

Semantics and Pragmatics

Historical Linguistics

Neogrammarian laws: Grimm's, Verner's, Grassmann's

Genesis and spread of sound change

Split and merger

Conditioned vs unconditioned change

Lexical diffusion of sound change

Analogical changes and paradigm levelling

Relative chronology

Sound change in progress

Morphosyntactic change: syncretism, grammaticalisation, lexicalisation

Semantic change: extension, narrowing, figurative speech

Linguistic reconstruction: external vs internal, comparative method

Lexicostatistics

Language contact, borrowing and its impact

Pidgins and creoles

Bilingualism and multilingualism as source of borrowing

Dialect geography: atlas, isogloss, focal, transition and relic areas

Sociolinguistics

Micro and macro approaches to language in society

Linguistic repertoire: dialect, sociolect, idiolect

Diglossia

Taboo, slang and euphemism

Elaborated and restricted codes

Speech community and communicative competence

Ethnography of speaking

Lingua franca, diasporic language

Linguistic variables and co-variation

Language policies and development in India

Language contact outcomes: loss, pidginization, creolization

Code-mixing and code-switching

Language movements and interventions

Script development

Linguistic minorities

Language ecology and endangerment, EGIDS scale

Documentation and revitalisation

Areal Typology, Universals, Cross-linguistic Features

Morphological types: agglutinative, analytical, synthetic fusional, polysynthetic

Formal and substantive universals

Absolute and statistical universals

Implicational and non-implicational universals (Greenberg)

Genetic, typological and areal classification

Universals and parametric variation

Word order typology

South Asian languages: Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, Tibeto-Burman

Linguistic Survey of India

Contact induced typological change

Methods of Analysis

Experimental and non-experimental methods

Sampling and tools

Identification of variables and variants

Data processing and interpretation

Quantitative analysis of data

Ethnomethodology

Participant observation

Field methods and elicitation

Document creation

Ethics

Applied Linguistics

How humans learn, represent, comprehend and produce language

Word recognition and storage

Sentence production and comprehension

Reading, speech perception

Language acquisition

Neural representation of language

Bilingualism

Language disorders

Psycholinguistics

GATE Humanities and Social Sciences - Linguistics Syllabus 2025, 2026 and more: Subjects, Topics, and What to Study