四川大学考博英语真题,考博英语试题

四川大学
2013年攻读博士学位研究生入学考试试题

考试科目：英语语言学理论
科目代码：3031
适用专业：外国语言学及应用语言学——英语语言学
（试题共2页）
（答案必须写在答题纸上，写在试题上不给分）
Part One (50%):
I. Explain the following terms (25%):
1. case theory
2. communicative competence
3. ethnolinguistics
4. hedge
5. historical linguistics
II. Answer the following two questions (25%):
1. Both Chomsky (whose teacher was a structuralist) and structuralist linguists have the same object for study: the syntactic structure (NP, VP etc.), to the neglect of meaning. Since this is the case, why should Chomsky criticize the structuralists? What constitute the essential differences of ideology concerning language study between them?
2. To M.A.K. Halliday, "the analysis of language comes within a social theory ... [it should be] an account of semantic options deriving from the social structure." What viewpoint concerning language and linguistics is he expressing with this statement and how would you comment on it?
Part Two (50%):
Answer the following questions:
1. F. de Saussure wrote in his COURS DE LINGUISTIQUE GÉNÉRALE that "other sciences work with objects that are given in advance ...... whereas in ours [linguistics] it would seem that it is the viewpoint that creates the object". He might be making too strong a claim, but do you think what he has said makes any sense in understanding the development of linguistics study since his time? If you do, please write an essay to bring out your view. Or, if you do not, please state your points also in an essay.
2. Some scholars claim that the Chinese language lacks abstract forms of nouns and for this reason the Chinese speakers cannot think in abstraction. For instance, in English, there are terms such as "sharp", "tree" etc, which can be transformed into abstract concepts by adding the suffix of "-ness" or by capitalizing the letters: "sharpness", "TREE". With the transformed terms, the English speakers can think about "the sharpness" in itself or about the idea of TREE, which is not any specific tree in actuality, but some sort of essential "treeness". Since the Chinese language does not have such morphological devices, the thought of the Chinese people is confined to specific things and cannot form abstract concepts. They conclude on this basis that there has been no philosophy in the western sense of the word and, for this reason, no science has been born in China. Indeed, no modern science is given birth to in China. In view of this fact, do you agree with their claims? Why or why not?