The Spanish quotative según across written genres

Abstract This research aims to provide an insight into characterization of quotative markers from a specific and prototypical Spanish one, según. The analysis is corpus-based, specifically the data comes from four different genres (academic articles, essays, news and novels). Our study examines the linguistic features, the source of information, the combination with reporting verbs, and the frequency in relation to genres. Thus, it underlines that, in contrast to the counterpart in other languages, the evidential function of según is fulfilled by means of a prepositional phrase or a clause bringing a reporting verb. Also, it demonstrates the modification of the prototypical specific source (3d person) causes a reduction of reliability as a pragmatic extension, and it shows the evidential function is the most frequent across written genres and has increased significantly in news.