Abstract

From a discursive point of view, the direct quotation procedures in contemporary Spanish have generally been analysed on the empirical basis of specific contexts or specific variants of the language, in such a way that there are various studies that deal with certain varieties of the spoken and written language, but none that encompasses the two modalities in their different possibilities and contrasts them with each other. The aim of this paper is to analyse the formal structure of direct style as a function of the discursive context, using a large corpus of examples of oral, theatrical, journalistic and narrative discourse in peninsular and American Spanish. The results obtained allow us to establish a typology of variants of the prototypical direct style for each type of discourse, as well as certain characteristics of the constructions which not only distinguish them as a class according to the type of discourse, but also, and mainly, according to the oral or written linguistic modality. Broadly speaking, it can be determined that the context conditions or, at least, influences the formal configuration of the constructions, the position of their members and the verbs or formulas used as introducers to the quotation.