令和 5 年度（2023 年度）
学校推薦型選抜 問題

小論

文

国際商経学部（グローバルビジネスコース）

注意事項
1. 試験監督者の指示があるまで、この問題冊子は開かないでください。
2. この問題冊子は表紙のほかに 2 ページあります。
3. 問題は大問Ⅰのみです。
4. 解答用紙は 3 枚あります。
5. 各解答用紙に氏名および受験番号の記入欄があります。試験監督者の指示に従い、すべての記入欄（氏名、受験番号各々3 箇所）に記入してください。
6. 解答は解答用紙の所定の箇所に記入してください。
7. 解答用紙の裏面には解答以外記入しないでください。
8. 下書き用紙は 3 枚あります。
9. 解答時間は 120 分です。
10. 試験終了後、問題冊子と下書き用紙は持ち帰ってください。

I. Read the following passage and then answer the questions in English.

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a shortarticle that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century.
At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequentcelebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s
Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, achemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as ananthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate forinternational superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluringidea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced awhole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we areable to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on theirspeakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers
would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like theflow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like“fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the generalpublic alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims
about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native Americanlanguages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s
concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish
religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common
sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence tosupport his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any
attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts wererelegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time toput the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has
revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain
habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising
ways.
Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was toassume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us frombeing able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments wasto claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers
would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense,
for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future
time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever haveachieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts youwherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present
tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion offuturity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the Germanword Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishingsomeone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able tounderstand, how would you ever learn anything new?
SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think
anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how ourmother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago,
the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about
differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially inwhat they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us
the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages
influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language
allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to thinkabout.
Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday
evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion wasmale or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of yourbusiness. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have theprivilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammarof language to choose between *voisin or voisine; *Nachbar or Nachbarin. Theselanguages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or
not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English
speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent withmale or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider thesexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time theycome up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged todo so.
On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types ofinformation that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you
in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention theneighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event:I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining
and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify theexact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used forpast, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese areunable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged
to think about timing whenever they describe an action.
When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types ofinformation, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and tocertain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not berequired to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech arecultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habitsof mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions,associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.
※From The New York Times. (c)2010 The New York Times Company. All rights
Reserved. Used under license.

Notes*voisin or voisine: “male neighbor” or “female neighbor” (French)*Nachbar or Nachbarin: “male neighbor” or “female neighbor” (German)※著作権の関係で、原文を掲載しています。実際の問題では、一部文の省略や表現（単語）が変更されています。

Questions
1. Write a summary of this passage in about 200 words. Use your own words. Do
not copy phrases from the passage.
2. According to the passage, what kind of information must be expressed in the
English language? Explain in your own words, with examples (about 100 words).
3. Do you think language influences the way we think. Explain your opinion in about
250 words.