Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction -- 1.1 What is style? What is stylistic variation? -- 1.2 Stylistic variation in Chinese -- 1.3 The scope of the present study -- 1.4 Notable findings and characteristics -- 1.5 Theoretical and practical implications -- 1.6 Chapter guide -- 2 Critique of existing literature -- 2.1 Narrow focus -- 2.2 Conceptual fuzziness -- 2.3 Lack of empirical support -- 3 Corpora and search tools -- 3.1 Brown family corpora -- 3.2 Beijing Language and Culture University corpus (BCC) -- 3.3 Center for Chinese Linguistics corpus, Peking University (CCL) -- 3.4 Modern Chinese Frequency Dictionary (MCFD) -- 3.5 English corpora -- 3.6 Offline concordancers -- 4 Features selection, selected features and frequency profiles -- 4.1 Feature selection -- 4.2 Selected feature frequency profiles -- 4.3 English features -- 5 Theoretical framework and correspondence analysis -- 5.1 Multi-feature, multidimensional framework for register variation -- 5.2 Correspondence analysis (CA) -- 6 Two dimensions of stylistic variation in modern written Chinese -- 6.1 Motivating the two dimensions with LCMC -- 6.2 Replication with other corpora -- 6.3 Independent support from Feng S.L. -- 6.4 Correspondence Analysis and Factor Analysis compared -- 7 Cross-linguistic comparison with English -- 7.1 COCA -- 7.2 Biber (1988) -- 8 Case studies -- 8.1 Finer differentiation of classical Chinese elements -- 8.2 Mixed compounds -- 8.3 Monosyllabic versus disyllabic -- 8.4 Morphological -- 8.5 (Near) synonyms -- 8.6 Classifier/measure words -- 8.7 Idioms -- 9 Theoretical issues and future directions -- 9.1 Chinese in the broader context -- 9.2 Contribution to general research on stylistic variation -- 9.3 Implications for grammatical analysis -- 9.4 Future directions -- 10 Practical implications