Quantitative Stylistic Analysis Of Mark Twain's Works Of The Different Periods

This paper aims at the quantitative study of Mark Twain's works, attempting to analyze and compare the features and changes of Twain's works of his different creating periods. After a series of computation and tests facilitated by FOXPRO and SPSS, pertinent data are obtained. The Chi-square tests as well as T-test and F-test are used to see if the difference of each item in each corpus is significant. It is found that the change of style occurs in all the three creating periods. From the linguistic point of view, the difference is significant on the level of graphology, the level of lexis and the level of semantics. As to the level of grammar, it is not significantly different. All in all, the works of the Middle Period most significantly reflect Twain's style of colloquialism.