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Genre-controlled constructions in written language quotatives
A case study of English quotatives from two major genres
- Author(s): Jessie Sams 1
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View Affiliations Hide AffiliationsAffiliations:1 University of Colorado at Boulder
- Source: Formulaic Language , pp 147-170
- Publication Date May 2009
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.
- Affiliations: 1: University of Colorado at Boulder
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