2011-12香港中文大学MA语言学部试题.docVIP

2011-12 CUHK Recruitment Test MA in Linguistics MA in Chinese Linguistics and Language Acquisition Name __________________________ Email __________________________ Phone __________________________ University __________________________ City __________________________ Province __________________________  Part One Answer all the questions in this section. (1) Chukchee (2) Olsk (3) English In Steven Pinker’s book The Language Instinct, sentences like the following are referred to as having “garden path effects” in that they involve certain structural ambiguities. Discuss by doing the following: - State what each sentence means; - Discuss how you analyze the structure of each sentence to get the right meaning; - Point out the problems you encounter when trying to reach the meanings you get. (Note: The sentences are grammatical.) a. Fat people eat accumulates. b. The cotton clothing is usually made of grows in Mississippi. Part 2 Answer one of the questions below in either English or Chinese: Question 1: A growing number of Hong Kong parents have decided to give their children a head start in life by trying to make English their native tongue. Some parents who are native speakers of Cantonese adopt the English only strategy to address their children hoping to bring up their children as native speakers of English, as described in the following article: “Emily and her husband speak Cantonese to each other and to their relatives, but switch into English when they speak to their two young children, aged two and four. The children utter only English words and are unable to communicate with their grandparents, who speak only Cantonese. But their parents think it is the inevitable price to pay for getting the children into an international school.” (from an article “The quest for English comes at a price” by Verna Yu published in South China Morning Post on 1 August 2010) Discuss the implications of the trend described