考博成功经验,含复习心得,部分试题类型和回忆以及个人答题。适用于英语专业特别是语言学方向考博的同学阅读。

A Summary of My Entrance Examination of Doctoral Program

This summary commences with my tentative answers to all the questions in the two rounds of entrance examinations in the hope of providing you with hints when you are to prepare for your doctorial program or maybe just for the oral defense of your master thesis. It is comprised of two sub-sections, the former of which summarizes my written examination in Soochow University, while the latter recapitulates the major points of re-examination, namely, the interview and proposal writing. Afterwards, I would like to share some of my thoughts through preparing the examinations.

We may begin with the key points of the written examination on linguistics of Soochow University. The exercises on this paper could be categorized into four different types: terminology, theoretical question, critical reading and theory application, the former two types of which, namely, terminology and theoretical question will be discussed in detail.

The paper begins with terminology explanation, which requires candidates to select two out of six terms to interpret. Among the six terms, four of them come from applied linguistics or more accurately speaking, language teaching and second language acquisition, while the left two lies in the realm of cognitive linguistics, which were selected by me.

1. What is “category” from the perspective of cognitive linguistics?

Cognitive view of “Category” is quite divergent from classical category theory, which refers itself as a realm of specific taxonomy according to certain standard with a clear-cut boundary, at least in the four superseding points:

1) Cognitive linguistics distinguishes prototypes and peripherals in a specific category and attributes different degrees of typicality to them. Typical members, namely, prototypes, are more likely to be firstly perceived and processed in conceptualization, compared with peripheral members. The same could be applied to the properties of a specific thing as well, which could be divided into prototypical and peripheral features. However, the positions of prototypes and peripherals, they argue, are not stubbornly stable, but reversible or changeable in different contexts. For example, penguin might be considered a peripheral member of the category of “bird”in Africa, but a prototype in Antarctic. The division between prototypes and peripherals, in one way or another, is linked with another important theory of cognitive linguistics, namely the prominence view or figure/ground segregation that figure has the perceptual prominence and more easily to be conceptualized than the ground. Similar to prototype and peripheral, it allows what we call figure/ground reversal. 2) In contrast with the classical view, arguing for a clear-cut border between adjacent categories, the prototypes/peripherals division directly contributes to the view of fuzzy boundary between categories, which, in another word, indicates a gradual shift rather than definite division between different categorizations. A typical case in point is the linkage between thigh and body and one cannot judge accurately which part is the division between the two parts. 3) The prototypical category theory reflects the prototype view of cognitive linguistics, which by nature could be considered as a significant way of conceptualization. To put it differently, the process of identifying certain category, namely, categorization, is one of the fundamental ways to know about the world. Prototype might be accounted as reference point, used to pin down the position of others by judging its relations to prototype. In that case, the prototypes that acquired earlier seem vitally important in understanding specific categories or even in knowing about the world, for instance, if a badly designed table is taken as prototype in one’s mind, then it would be

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