Both contrastive studies of Chinese and western ancient cultures and experimental studies in modern cultural psychology
show that holistic and dialectic thinking are typical Chinese
ways of thinking. The pre-sent study set out to look into the influence of these ways of thinking on linguistic research in China.We chose university teachers of English as our subjects,as they are the main force in the field of linguistics in China.We studied their attitudes on four major classic controversies in linguistics. They are:A) the
controversy between theories of modularity and theories of interaction, B) the controversy between theories of continuity and theories of non - continuity, C) the controversy between environmental theories,nativist theories and cognitive theories in language acquisition, D) the controversy of the relationship between thinking and language. For each controversy,we designed five choices.The general pattern of the choices is like this (but somewhat modified for the last two controversies):1) Theory One is more convincing.2) Theory Two is more convincing.3) Both theories are convincing. They are significant and deserve some further study.4) Both theories are convincing. But they are not significant and deserve no further study.5) Both theories are not convincing. There are three general results. The first result shows that there were significantly more subjects Ⅰ ) choosing theories of interaction (42%) instead of those of modularity (0%); Ⅱ ) choosing theories of continu-ity (56%) instead of non - continuity (14%); Ⅲ ) choosing cognitive theories (17%) instead of nativist theories (0%); IV ) believing that language influences thinking (58%), not that thinking is independent of language. This result is consistent with predictions of the Chinese's holistic ways of thinking. The second result shows that those subjects who didn't choose holistic ways of thinking chose dialectic ways of thinking. That is, they made the 3 rd choice: both theories are convincing (58%, 30%, 72%, 31% respectively for the four controversies). The third result is that subjects with higher degrees or academic titles demonstrate higher percentages of dialectic ways of thinking than those with lower degrees or academic titles. In short, subjects' attitudes demonstrate a clear tendency toward holistic and dialectic ways of think-ing, even in cases where previous linguistic training should have led them to an analytical way of thinking.