A Stylistic Analysis On Three Short Stories Of O. Henry

O. Henry is one of the most important writers in American literature history in the beginning of the 20th century. His works are loved and appreciated by the readers around the world. The previous studies are mainly from the literary angles, but in this thesis the author forms the corpus 3OHENRY by selecting three short stories of O. Henry--- The Gift of the Magi, The Cop and the Anthem and The Last Leaf---and tries to analyze them from the linguistic point of view. Based on the theory of stylistics, the study is taken from the graphological level, lexical level, syntactic level and semantic level; and the corpora LOB and BROWN are employed to make statistical analysis and comparison. In the analysis, the distinctive stylistic features of the selected three short stories are found and revealed.On graphological level, it is found that quotation marks, question marks and exclamation marks are frequently employed in 3OHENRY by making comparison with BROWN and LOB, and the chosen texts in 3OHENRY have larger average paragraph length. Further more, more periods and commas are used than the other punctuation marks in the selected texts.On lexical level, employing shorter words and more pronouns in 3OHENRY than that of BROWN and LOB are typical. The percentage of nouns is higher than that of other word classes in 3OHENRYOn syntactic level, the short sentence, the sentence fragment and less employment of passive voice are the most obvious stylistic features of the three short stories in 3OHENRY.On semantic level, the material of 3OHENRY prefers to employ the third person narrators in writing. And some cohesive and rhetorical devices are applied to achieve brevity and vividness. Twist ending of O. Henry, as his trade mark, is most noticeable feature.