Genre-controlled constructions in written language quotatives

Abstract

Quotatives in written language serve a variety of functions, depending on genre. Newspaper quotatives often introduce new participants by providing appropriate background information and tend to be more formulaic; fiction quotatives can describe narrativeadvancing events or develop characters and are often more creative. This study examines quotatives from these two major written genres and uses a set of lexical and grammatical features (quotative position, quoting verb type, nominal versus pronominal speakers, adverb and adjective use, quotative inversion, and null quotatives) to illustrate that these functional differences affect quotative form. This paper also examines quotatives from a gossip column, which is functionally and formally similar in some ways to both newspapers and fiction books, to further distinguish genre-dependent features.

Stylized Quotations as Parodic Practice in Teenage Dating Blogs: Stylizing Patterns, Quotative Marking and Language-Ideological Meanings

“…The overall distribution of quotative forms is shown in The findings from online language use are comparable to the existing data from offline speech (Martinez 2014, Barbieri 2009) and offline writing (Sams 2009). More broadly, looking at the findings from the present online data and earlier offline data, differences are interesting to observe compared to the findings from mid-to-late 20 th century, showing the quotative system has evolvedfor most of the history of English the inventory was the same (say, think, and the zero quotative, cf.…”