文体学是用语言学方法研究文体风格的学问。 就目前的发展来看,文体学的研究范围大致包括语体学、文学文体学和理论文体学。 语体学研究包括语言的各种变体。例如,按交际媒介和信息的传递方式而论,有口语、书面语、网络语。因交际的双方关系的不同, 有正式、非正式、和亲密体之分; 因社会实践活动的不同, 有法律、科技、新闻、广告、体育报道、商业、医学、文学和日常生活之分。

语言学家分析作品,把作品当成提供语言素材的文本(TEXT) 以展示文本内各种成分的结构关系; 文学批评家分析文学作品把作品当成信息( message) 致力于发掘作品的审美意义和社会道德。文体 学家分析作品, 把作品当成语篇(discourse) 当成一种交际形式,说明作品中的语言成分怎样组合 起来传达信息,探讨哪些语言特征最具有文体效果,有助于该作品完成其交际功能。

Stylistics is a both theatrical and practical course. It concerns with Linguistics and literary texts. It is a cross-disciplinary course. To be more exactly, it applies the linguistic theory to literary texts.

With learning and studying the course, on the one hand, we can understand linguistic better, On the other hand, we can grasp another method for analyzing the literary texts. (We will talk about the ways of analyzing literary texts) Besides it is a cross-disciplinary of linguistics and literature, the course can relate some other subjects, such as the rhetoric, the literary and translation.

To be more specific: First, in the course we may use the linguistic theory, the elements -- phonology and graphology, lexical choice, syntactic of language to analyze texts. Second, we may analyze the functional style -- The English of Publish speech; English of New Reporting; the English of science and technology, The English of legal documents; The English of literature ( of course here we may use more literary texts as the samples for stylistic analysis) Thirdly, it will cover some rhetoric.