Genre-controlled constructions in written language quotatives

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.