Feature Instability as a Criterion for Selecting Potential Style Marke

We introduce a new measure on linguistic features, called stability, which captures the extent to which language element, such as a word or a syntactic construct, is replaceable by semantically equivalent elemen This measure may be perceived as quantifying the degree of available “synonymy” for a language item. W show that frequent but unstable features are especially useful as discriminators of an author’s writing style.