A Corpus-based Stylistic Study Of O.Henry’s Works

The study is based on an authentic collection of O. Henry’s shortstories,100Selected Stories, from which the first twenty short stories areselected as the subject of the study in the stylistic analysis around thevocabulary, grammar and rhetoric in this thesis. The data are put into thecomputer manually in the form of TXT to construct O. Henry’s shortstories’ corpus. The software Antconc3.2.1w is used to analyze thelanguage data. The rhetoric phenomena such as metaphor, personification,irony which cannot be distinguished by the computer are collected invirtue of electronic calculator manually，to give the corpus annotations,such as the grammatical structure annotation. Quantitative statistics isapplied to analyze the data in this paper. The author selects an article, theGift of Magi, from the twenty articles. The author uses its data to analyzethe quantitative statistics in vocabulary, grammar and rhetoric. Thepurpose is to find out what is O. Henry’s writing characteristics and howto appreciate his works.