ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the general issues of feature selection and then the possible stylistic relevance of selected features will be discussed and their frequency profiles across different text types will be presented. In addition to providing the basis for the multidimensional analysis the frequency data can also be used as reference for teachers and learners of Chinese. A number of considerations have been used in choosing the feature sets for the present study, including previous observations, intuition, reference to English, the heuristic principle of minimal contrast and logistics. A working assumption of the present work is that style is indeed separate from semantics, especially referential semantics. The most important criterion used to distinguish semantic meaning from stylistic meaning is that of minimal contrast. Lexical choices are more transparently related to style. The difference between lexical and grammatical features is related to the difference between class features and individual features/exemplars.
