KSET Syllabus Linguistics

PÀ£ÁðlPÀ gÁdå ¸ÀºÁAiÀÄPÀ ¥ÁæzsÁå¥ÀPÀgÀ CºÀðvÁ ¥ÀjÃPÉë (PÉ-¸Émï)
KARNATAKA STATE ELIGIBILITY TEST (K-SET)
FOR ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

Subject: LINGUISTICS Subject Code: 38

SYLLABUS

UNIT – 1 : LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS

Nature of language : Language in spoken and written modes, language as written text –
philological literary notions i.e., norm, purity and their preservation; language as a cultural
heritage – codification and transmission of cultural knowledge and behavior; language as a
marker of social identity; language as an object i.e., notion of autonomy, structure and its units
and components; design Features of language; writing system – units of writing – sound
(alphabetic), or syllable (syllabic) and morpheme/word (logographic), sign language; existence
of language faculty; linguistic competence, ideal speaker-hearer.
Approaches to the Study of Language : Ancient approaches to the study of language: Indian
and Greco-Roman, semiotic approach – interpretation of sign; language as a system of social
behavior – use of language in family, community and country; language as a system of
communication – communicative functions- emotive, cognitive , referential, poetic,
metalinguistic and phatic; language as a cognitive system; relation with culture and thought
(Linguistic Relativity); Saussurean dichotomies: signifier and signified, langue and parole,
synchronic and diachronic, syntagmatic and paradigmatic.

Language Analysis: Levels and their hierarchy – phonetic /phonological, morphological,
syntactic and semantic/pragmatic; their interrelations; linguistic units and their distribution at
different levels; notions of contrast and complementation; - emic and –etic categorization;
notion of rule at different levels; description vs. explanation of grammatical facts.
Linguistics and other Fields: Relevance of Linguistics to other fields of enquiry – Philosophy,
Anthropology, Sociology, Neurology, Speech Sciences, Geography, Psychology, Education,
Computer Science and Literature.

1

Unit 2 : Phonetics and Phonology

Phonetics

Phonetics as a study of speech sounds; articulatory, auditory, and acoustic phonetics.
Articulatory Phonetics: Process of speech production: airstream process, oro-nasal process,
phonation process, and articulatory process; classification of speech sounds: vowels and
consonants, cardinal vowels (primary and secondary); complex articulation: secondary
articulation, coarticulation; syllable; suprasegmentals –length, stress, tone, intonation and
juncture; phonetic transcription: International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).

Acoustic Phonetics: Sound waves – simple and complex, periodic and aperiodic; harmonics;
frequency and fundamental frequency, amplitude, duration; resonance, filters, spectrum,
spectrogram; formants, transition, burst; voice onset time; aspiration; noise spectra; cues for
speech sounds; vowel (monophthong and diphthong), semivowel, stop, fricative, nasal, lateral,
glide, places of articulation of consonants.

Phonology

Descriptive Phonology: Phonetics vs. phonology; concept of phoneme, phone and allophone;
principles of phonemic analysis – phonetic similarity, contrastive distribution, complementary
distribution, free variation, pattern congruity; nations of biuniqueness, neutralization and
archiphoneme.

Generative Phonology: Linear and non-linear approaches: levels of phonological
representation; phonological rules; distinctive features (major class, manner, place, etc.);
abstractness controversy; rule ordering and types of rule ordering, markedness; principles of
lexical phonology; principles of optimality theory.

Unit – 3. Morphology
Basic Concepts: Scope and nature of morphology; concepts of morpheme, morph, allomorph,
zero allomorph, conditions on allomorphs; lexeme and word; Types of morphemes – free and
bound; root, stem, base, suffix, infix, prefix, portmanteau morpheme, suppletive, replacive;

2

affixes vs. clitics; grammatical categories – tense, aspect, mood, person, gender, number, case;
case markers and case relations; pre-and post-positions; models of morphological description:
item and arrangement, item and process, word and paradigm;

Morphological Analysis: Identification of morphemes; morphological alternation;
morphophonemic processes; internal and external sandhi; inflection vs. derivation; conjugation
and declension.

Word-Formation Processes: Derivation (primary vs. secondary derivation, nominalization,
verbalization, etc.), compounding (types of compounds: endocentric, exocentric, etc.),
reduplication, back-formation, conversion, clipping, blending, acronyms, fold etymology,
creativity and productivity, blocking, bracketing paradoxes, constraints on affix ordering.

Morpho-syntax: Nominalization and lexicalist hypothesis; grammatical function changing rules:
causatives, passives.

Unit – 4 : Syntax

Traditional and Structural Syntax : parts of speech: Indian classification (naama, aakhyaata,
upasarga, nipaata); basic syntactic units and their types: word, phrase, clause, sentence, karaka
relations; grammatical relations and case relations; construction types (exocentric, endocentric,
etc.), immediate constituent analysis.

Generative Syntax: Parameters and universal grammar, null subject parameter, innateness
hypothesis, meaning of the term ‘generative’ transformational generative grammar, structure
and structure-dependence, diagnostics for structure; complements and adjuncts, principles and
parameters theory, X-bar theory, theta theory, binding theory; pro-drop, NP-movement, wh-
movement, head movement, adjunction and substitution, constraints on movement, subjacency,
government and proper government, small clauses, topicalization; unergatives and
unaccusatives, VP-internal subject hypothesis; split VP and VP-shell hypothesis, cross-over
phenomena; checking theory of case, copy theory of movement, inclusiveness principle.

Some Key Concepts in the Minimalist Programme: Spell-out, greed, procrastination, last resort,
AGR-based case theory, multiple-spec hypothesis, strong and weak features; interpretable and
non –interpretable features.

3

Transformational components: The copy theory of movement, its properties, checking devices
and features of convergence.

Unit – 5 : Semantics and Pragmatics

Semantics: Types of meaning; descriptive, emotive and phatic; sense and reference, connotation
and denotation, sense relations (homonymy, hyponymy, antonymy, synonymy, etc.); types of
opposition (taxonomic, polar, etc.); ambiguity, sentence meaning and truth conditions,
contradictions, entailment; ‘abhidha’, ‘laksana’, ‘vyanjana’, Nations of membership, union,
intersection, cardinality; mapping and functions; propositions, truth values, sentential
connectives; arguments, predicates, quantifiers, variables; componential analysis; definiteness,
mood and modality, specific vs. generic; definite and indefinite; compositionality and its
limitations.

Pragmatics: Language use in context; communication: message model and inferential model
of communication, sentence meaning and utterance meaning; speech acts; deixis; presupposition
and implicature: Gricean maxims; information structure; indexicals, politeness, power and
solidarity, discourse analysis.

Unit – 6 : Historical Linguistics

Sound Change: Neogrammarian laws of phonetic change: Grimm’s Verner’s, Grassmann’s
Laws; genesis and spread of sound change; split an merger; conditioned vs. unconditioned
change; types of changes –phonetic vs. phonemic changes; assimilation and dissimilation,
coalescence, metathesis, deletion, epenthesis; lexical diffusion of sound change; analogy and its
relationship to sound change; reconstructing the proto-stages of languages; tree and wave
models; relative chronology of different changes. Sociolinguistic approach to language change:
social motivation of language change; study of sound change in progress.

Morphosyntactic and Semantic Change: Phonological change leading to changes in
morphology and syntax; syntax; syncretism, grammaticalisation and lexicalization; principles of
recovering grammatical categories and contrasts; semantic change and processes of semantic
change –extension, narrowing, figurative speech.

Linguistic Reconstruction: External vs. internal reconstruction: cpmparative method, collection
of cognates, establishing phonological correspondences; reconstruction of the phonemes of the
proto-language based on contrast and complementation; morphophonemic alternations as the
source for reconstruction; recovering historical contrasts by comparing, alternating and non-
alternating paradigms; accounting for exceptions to sound change-analogy, borrowing,
onomatopoeia, the interplay of analogy and sound change; lexicostatistics.

4

Language Contact and Dialect Geography: Linguistic borrowing, lexical and structural;
motivations, loan translation, loan blend, calque, assimilated and unassimilated loans: tadbhava
and tatsama; different types of borrowing-- cultural, intimate and dialect; classification of
loanwords; impact of borrowing on language; pidgins and creoles; bilingualism as the source for
borrowing; dialect geography: dialect atlas; isogloss; focal area, transition area and relic area

Unit – 7 : Sociolinguistics

Basic Concepts: Sociolinguistics and sociology of language; micro- and macro approaches to
language in society; linguistic repertoire: language, dialect, sociolect, idiolocat; diglossia, taboo,
slang; elaborated and restricted codes; speech community, communicative competence,
ethnography of speaking; language of
wider communication; lingua franca; language and social inequality; language in diaspora; new
linguistic; world orders.

Linguistic Variability : Patterns in linguistic variation, linguistic variables and their co-variation
with linguistic dimensions, social class/ social network / age / gender/ ethnicity; language
loyalty, social identity and social attitudes, stereotypes.

Language Contact: Bilingualism, multilingualism; code-mixing and code-switching; outcomes
of language contact: language maintenance, borrowing, convergence, substratum effect,
pidginization and creolization; language loss.

Language Development : Language planning, corpus and status planning, standardization and
modernization; language movements – state and societal interventions; script development and
modifications; linguistic minorities and their problems.

Language Ecology and Endangerment: Superdiversity, linguistic landscaping, linguistic
vitality, language endangerment, parameters of endangerment, documentation of endangered
languages, revitalization.

Sociolinguistic Methodology: Sampling and tools; identification of sociolinguistic variables and
their variants; data processing and interpretation; quantitative analysis of data; variables rules;
ethnomethodology; participant observation.

Unit – 8 : Areal Typology and South Asian Language Families

Language Typology, Universals and Linguistic Relatedness: Language typology and language
universals; morphological types of languages - agglutinative, analytical (isolating), synthetic

5

fusional (inflecting), infixing and polysynthetic (incorporating) languages. Formal and
substantive universals, absolute and statistical universals; implicational and non-implicational
universals; linguistic relatedness – genetic, typological and areal classification of languages.

Approaches for Study: Inductive vs deductive approaches; universals of language and
parametric variation; word order typology; Greenberg’s characteristics for verb final an verb
medical languages and related features in the context of south Asian Languages.

Salient Features of South Asian Languages: Phonetic, phonological, morphological, and
syntactic features of Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austro-Asiatic, and Tibeto - Burman language
families of South Asia; Linguistic Survey Asia; Linguistic Survey of India as a source of
information; contact induced typological change; convergence and syntactic change.

India as a Linguistic Area: The notion of linguistic area; language contact and convergence
with special reference to the concept of ‘India as a Linguistic Area’; features of retroflexion,
vowel harmony, aspiration, reduplication, echo formation, onomatopoeia, explicator compound
verbs, anaphora; India as sociolinguistic area, India as a semantic area; notion of microlinguistic
area.

Unit – 9 : Interdisciplinary and Applied Linguistics – I
(Psycholinguistics, Language Learning and Language Teaching)

Psycholinguistics

Basic Concepts: Basic issues in psycholinguistics, brain language relationship, the different
theoretical orientations : e mpiricist – behaviourist, biological – nativist, and cognitive-
interactionalist, biological foundations of language; language acquisition and stages; critical
period hypothesis.

Language Processing: The processes of perception, comprehension and production; evidence of
language production; steps in comprehension; mental representation of language and lexicon;
relationship between comprehension and production.

Clinical Psycholinguistics; Normal and pathological language; aphasia; dyslexia; stuttering;
language in the hearing –impaired; language in mental retardation.

Language Learning and Language Teaching:

Language Teaching and Language Learning: First and second language learning;
behaviouristic and cognitive theories of language learning; social and psychological aspects of

6

second language acquisition; methods of language teaching; materials and teaching-aids in
language teaching; computer assisted language teaching (CALT); language testing: types of
tests; validity, reliability and standardization of tests; Interlanguage.

Language Teaching Analysis: Goals of language teaching; factors in the preparation of
language teaching syllabus: linguistic theory, social and psychological factors, needs analysis,
class-room presentation; text-book evaluation; types of syllabus: Structural, communicative,
national; the role of the teacher and teacher training ; role of self-access packages; socio-
linguistic and psychological aspects of language teaching and learning.

Contrastive Analysis: Error analysis and interlanguage; basic interpersonal communicative
skills (BICS) and cognitive advanced language proficiency (CALP);

Unit – 10 : Interdisciplinary and Applied Linguistics – II (Translation, Lexicography,
Computational Linguistics, Stylistics, Language and Media)

Translation

Paraphrase, translation and transcreation; translation of literary text and technical text; use of
linguistics in translation; linguistic affinity and translatability; untranslatability; units of
translation ; equivalence of meaning and style; translation loss and gain; problems of cultural
terms; scientific terms; idioms, metaphors and proverbs; false friends and translation shifts;
evaluation of translation; fidelity and readability; types of translation – simultaneous
interpretation, machine aided translation, media translation (dubbing, copy-editing,
advertisement, slogans, jingles, etc.)

Lexicography

Making of a Dictionary: Linguistics and lexicography, dictionary entries – arrangement of
information; meaning descriptions – synonymy, polysemy, homonymy, antonymy and
hyponymy; treatment of technical terms vs. general words.
Types of Dictionaries: Literary, scientific and technical; comprehensive and concise,
monolingual and bilingual; general and learner’s historical and etymological, dictionary of
idioms and phrases, encyclopaedic dictionary, electronic dictionary, reverse dictionary, thesaurus
and other distinguishing purpose and features of various types; computational lexicography.

Computational Linguistics

Artificial intelligence and language; natural language processing (NLP); computational
linguistics and its relation to allied disciplines; machine language; parsing and generation;

7

parsers; compilers; interpreters – information processing, structuring and manipulating data;
corpus building; attempts of NLP and corpus work in India: Anusaraka parsing: morphological
recognizers, analyzers and generators for Indian languages; designing code, building of machine
translation systems (MTS); hyper grammars, building of word nets, The Kolhapur Corpus of
Indian English, the TDIL Corpus Project.

Stylistics

Style – individual style, period style,; style as choice, style as deviation, style as ‘riti’, style as
‘alankara’; style as ‘vyanjana’ (‘vakrokti’); Foregrounding; Parallelism; Text as grammar:
structure and texture, cohesion and coherence; semiotic aspects of a literary text; stylistics of
discourse; levels of stylistic analysis – phonological, lexical, syntactic and semantic; stylistic
devices in literary texts.

Language and Media

Mass media: print and electronic, types of language used in mass media; news, editorials,
advertising, writing and editing for print and electronic media, impact of mass media on
language.
***

8