LINGUISTIC FEATURES OF MARK TWAIN'S WORKS A CORPUS-STYLISTIC STUDY OF VERNACULARITY, NARRATIVE VOICE, AND HUMOR

This study examines the linguistic features that make Mark Twain's prose recognizable across fiction, travel writing, and autobiographical narrative. It combines qualitative stylistic interpretation with a reproducible corpus-based analysis of five works: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, and Life on the Mississippi. The corpus contains 686,755 word tokens drawn from public-domain Project Gutenberg editions. Rule-based procedures were used to calculate mean sentence length, mean segmental type-token ratio, normalized frequencies of first- and second-person pronouns, contractions, selected vernacular spellings, speech-reporting verbs, question marks, exclamation marks, and dialogue-initial lines. The results show a consistent relationship between genre, narrative perspective, and linguistic texture. The two novels display markedly higher rates of contractions, vernacular markers, interrogatives, exclamatives, and dialogue than the travel and memoir texts. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has the highest frequency of first-person reference and selected vernacular forms, confirming that its narrative voice is constructed through sustained oralization rather than occasional local color. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer records the highest exclamation rate and the greatest density of dialogue-initial lines, which supports its rapid scene construction and comic theatricality. By contrast, the travel narratives exhibit broader lexical diversity, longer sentences, and a more essayistic relation between narrator and audience. The analysis argues that Twain's style is not a single inventory of dialect spellings but a flexible system in which syntax, pronoun choice, dialogue management, evaluative punctuation, deadpan understatement, hyperbole, and shifts between elevated and colloquial registers work together. These features create character, organize social distance, and transform humor into a form of cultural criticism.