ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the possibilities and problems encountered in extending one such concept from its original domain, clinical linguistics, into an area of inquiry for which it was never intended, stylistics. In the 1980s the term profile came to be encountered in a prodigious number of linguistic contexts, especially in foreign language teaching and the first language curriculum. Profiles were devised for segmental phonology, prosody, grammatical semantics and lexical semantics. The chapter illustrates the data provided by Crystal and Davy. Immediately, two broad approaches to stylistic profile construction suggest themselves, corresponding to the widely recognized distinction between language structure and language use. In the former approach, the main dimensions of the profile correspond to the structural 'level' of the linguistic model used, namely phonetics, phonology, graphetics, graphology, grammar and semantics. In the latter approach, the profile's main dimensions correspond to these functional categories, and the structural features are classified with reference to each category.
