Week 1 · Course Orientation 课程导入

Sep 14, 2026 · ← Course home

Session 1 — Course orientation. Who is teaching, and where the course is going. We drew the course card (16 weeks × 2 class hours; a bridge discipline between linguistics, literature, translation and data), and I sketched my own route into the field — from a BA in English literature, through corpus linguistics and translation studies, to a joint PhD between Tongji University and Ghent University’s LT3 lab, working on corpus translation studies, machine translation post-editing and LLM applications. The message I want to leave from that story: you do not have to choose between loving literature and handling technology.

We then took a first taste of style itself: the same event worded two ways — the police asserted that the assailant had fled the scene versus the cops said the thug had legged it — and saw how every choice (police/cops, fled/legged it, clause vs. phrasal verb) builds a different world. Working definition for the course: style is the consistent pattern of choices among linguistic alternatives, and stylistics is the systematic study of those choices and their effects. Finally, the computational turn: from close reading to distant reading, and the questions only computation answers well (who wrote the disputed Federalist Papers; are the last forty chapters of 红楼梦 by the same hand as the first eighty; can translationese be measured), plus the flight plan for Weeks 10–15: corpus → tools → features → modelling, zero code required to start.

Session 2 — Mapping English stylistics. The discipline itself: how stylistics grew from classical rhetoric through the linguistic turn (Jakobson, Halliday) and the pragmatic-cognitive turn (Leech & Short, Fowler) to today’s corpus and computational work, and who is who internationally and in China. The two textbooks and two reference works, and how we will read them. The ladder of levels where style lives — graphology, phonology, lexis, syntax, semantics/pragmatics, discourse — and Halliday’s register theory (Field × Tenor × Mode) as the engine behind the varieties we will study. Two frontier crossings: stylistics in translation studies (layered understanding; 重神似不重形似; style-clash failures) and stylistics meets narratology (story vs. discourse; focalisation; 申丹’s covert progression). We closed with the 16-week roadmap, the assessment scheme, and group formation (3–4 per group, literary and technical bents mixed).

Slides: SUEP_stylistics_01.pdf

Prep for Week 2: Simpson Unit A3 “Grammar and Style” (and B3 for the bold); skim the opening chapters of 刘宓庆《文体与翻译》.