The article discusses some linguistic features of the differentiation of high and low styles in Spanish literature of the Golden Age. The study is based on the semantic and syntactic analysis of adjectives as linguistic elements with high stylistic potential. Contrastive analysis of the corpus of adjectives in the language of Cervantes' novel «Don Quixote» main characters, representing two poles of culture, scholar and folk, revealed the relevant characteristics of high and low styles, clearly marking the stylistic diversity of the text. The study of style markers’ functioning in the text of other works of the Golden Age, written by different writers and belonging to different literary genres, suggests that the identified style-forming features correspond to the stylistic paradigm of the literary discourse of the era and are stable markers of the text's style.