Review 
of the final qualifying paper of Haofei Chen on 
"Linguistic deviations in Stephen King's English language short stories"


The final qualifying paper of Haofei Chen is focused on the study of standard language deviations in stories of the contemporary American writer Stephen King. As the stories of S. King are quite popular, they are read in the original by a vast number of English language learners all over the world and also translated into many other languages, while the originality of the author's style is usually maintained. Therefore, it is important to analyze the stylistic features of the stories and motives of the author who uses linguistic deviations, which additionally determines the relevance of this study. The novelty of the study lies within the fact that it was first performed on the evidence collected from the six stories of S. King.

Structurally, the final qualifying paper of Haofei Chen consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, a list of references and a sources list. The introduction presents the goal and objectives of the thesis, the subject and the object of the study in question, as well as its theoretical and methodological foundations. The subject of the first chapter is the theoretical issues relating to linguistic and literary norms, the classification of deviations, and issues of using language standards violations as a stylistic means. Despite the obvious language difficulties, Haofei Chen has succeeded in synthesizing and to structuring her own text on the basis of a relatively short references list.

The second chapter of the paper features examples and classification of linguistic deviations that are present in a number of stories of S. King. It is worth mentioning that all the examples were independently identified by the author, despite the fact that – to a certain extent – the author herself is still in the process of English language acquisition. In addition, the author has been able to make a brief analysis of the reasons for using linguistic deviations in each of the analyzed stories.

Among the advantages of this work, we would like to note the independently implemented practical part of the study. Leaving the level of the Russian language out of the equation, it can be argued that the work of Haofei Chen meets the basic requirements for the final qualifying paper and can be admitted to the defense, potentially deserving positive evaluations.

Academic adviser:

Alina V. Shitova, 
Senior Lecturer, 
Department of Foreign Languages and Linguodidactics,
Faculty of Philology,
St. Petersburg State University,
Russia