香港中文大学2013语言学测试

2012-13 CUHK Recruitment Test
MA in Linguistics
MA in Chinese Linguistics and Language Acquisition
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Section One
Answer all the questions in this section.
Question 1
Examine the following words from Zogue, a language spoken in Mexico.
(1)What is the Zoque morpheme indicating the past tense?
(2)What is the Zoque morpheme meaning ‘he’ or ‘it’?
(3)List the allomorphs of each of the verb stem morphemes, along with their
meanings.
(4)What conditions the appearance of these allomorphs? What phonological
process is applying?
Question 2
Examine the following words from Spanish. Determine if [s] and [z] in this language are allophones of the same phoneme or if they belong to different phonemes. If they are allophones of the same phoneme, write a phonological rule for their realization and name the rule. If they belong to different phonemes, give the evidence.
Question 3
Use tree diagram(s) to represent the possible structure(s) of the following sentence: The teacher of the boy and the girl will come.
Question 4
Are there any errors in the following sentences? Correct them if you find any and explain your correction.
i.那个时候我不知不觉地喜欢汉语和中国。

ii.虽然我是在国外长大了，我还是想在中国立业。

iii.It is a such beautiful picture.
iv.Me and her mother split up about two years ago.
Section Two
Answer one of the questions in either English or Chinese:
Question 1
Explain in your own words in what sense language is systematic. Give appropriate examples to illustrate your points.
Question 2
Discuss the role of language input in L2 acquisition.
Section Three
Choose one of the following questions and write a one-page essay in response to the question. Please follow the style of academic discourse, and conventions for citation and reference (if any). Please use English only.
Question 1
The sentence John can’t swim, can he? in (a) and (b) below can mean two different things. Analyze the contexts of the sentence, and tell what the two possible meanings are. Is the meaning difference related to how the sentence is said? If yes, describe the phonological differences.
(a)Let’s not go swimming tomorrow. John can’t swim, can he?
(b)You want to go swimming tomorrow? Good heavens! John can’t swim, can he?
Question 2
Imagine there are three groups of immigrants to the US. Group 1 is between the ages of 6 and 17, group 2 is between the ages of 17 and 30 and group 3 is over 31.
They all come from the same country, have the same L1 and none of them speaks any English at the time of arrival. After five years they are tested on their English.
What predictions would you make? Which age groups would have learned English best and why?
Do you believe it is possible for the oldest group to become fluent in English–and why (not)?
In what aspects of language (fluency, grammar, pronunciation) would you expect the biggest differences between the groups and why?。