十九世纪末,美国内布拉斯加大学有一位名叫谢尔曼(L.A.sherman)的英文教授。此人当时颇有名气,著有《文学分析》(Analystics of Literature,1893)一书。这是美国最早的用文体学方法评论文学作品的著作。研究了几百年间英文散文的发展变化之后,谢尔曼教授发现,英语作家逐渐学会了用不完全主语和谓语表达思想。最初,他们用一连串以and连接起来的句子把什么都写出来;接着,他们使用从属句;后来,学会了把从句缩成短语。于是 At the end of the nineteenth century, there was an English professor named L. A. Sherman at the University of Nebraska. This man was quite famous at that time, author of “Literature Analysis” (Analystics of Literature, 1893) a book. This is the first book in the United States that uses stylistic methods to comment on literary works. After studying the development and changes of English essays over several hundred years, Professor Sherman found that English writers gradually learned to express their thoughts in incomplete subjects and predicates. Initially, they wrote everything in a series of sentences connected by and; then, they used subordinate sentences; later, they learned to reduce the clause to the phrase. then