English Stylistics 英语文体学 (Fall 2026)

A 16-week course for third-year English majors. Stylistics asks a simple question: why this wording, here, for this effect? — in poems, novels, news reports, contracts and advertisements alike. We learn to describe a text’s language systematically, then explain, with evidence from the grammar, how it works.

The course runs in two halves. Weeks 1–9 build the classical toolkit: the levels of language (from graphology up to discourse), clause grammar and the transitivity system, lexis, phonology, semantics and pragmatics, register and functional varieties, narrative viewpoint and speech presentation — each theory week paired with an applied variety and its translation strategy. Weeks 10–15 turn computational: building and cleaning corpora, AntConc and Sketch Engine, stylistic feature extraction and vectorisation, machine-learning text classification and visualisation, starting from zero code. Week 16 is given over to group project presentations.

The standard we train toward is Simpson’s three Rs: analysis that is rigorous (based on the grammar), retrievable (others can retrace your steps) and replicable (repeatable on new data).

Textbooks

• Simpson, Paul. Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students. 3rd ed. Routledge, 2025. — the theory spine; lectures follow the A and B units, C units feed workshops
• 刘宓庆.《文体与翻译》. 中译翻译文库, 2019. — the applied backbone: variety-by-variety translation strategies
• 董启明.《新编英语文体学教程》. 外研社, 2008. — checklist handbook; reach for it when revising or scaffolding a first paper
• Shen, Dan. Discourse and Style. Routledge, 2024. — the narratology × stylistics frontier

Assessment (provisional; tuned by the Week-1 survey)

• 20% coursework — attendance, class tasks and discussion
• 20% midterm — a mini corpus-experiment report
• 60% final — group empirical project (corpus or close-reading track) with live defence; an individual term paper is an alternative

Weekly schedule

Slides, data and tools are posted on each week’s page after class. Dates below are nominal Mondays; holiday adjustments are announced in the class WeChat group.