Week 4 · Lexis: The Vocabulary of Style 词汇层

Oct 5, 2026 · ← Course home

Planned session. Word choice as style. We look at lexis as a layer where register announces itself: formal vs. informal markers, Latinate vs. Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, slang, jargon and dialect; semantic fields and how a text’s word-stock builds a world; collocation — expected and broken — as an expressive resource.

Applications run from literary diction to the lexical profiles of advertising and news. We also preview the quantitative side: word frequency and keyword lists are exactly what we will compute with AntConc in Week 11, so keep your intuitions ready to be tested against counts.

Key concepts: register markers; semantic field; collocation; lexical density; connotation.

Reading: Simpson’s unit on lexis; 董启明 on the lexical rung of the checklist.

Slides and materials will be posted here after class.