Quizá(s) y tal vez en novelistas de España y América

In this paper I intend to analyze the rate of occurrence of two adverbials of possibility, quiza(s) and tal vez, in prose narratives by eight Spanish and Latin American novelists. The main goal is to check, through a thorough statistical scrutiny, whether these adverbs are author-related or not. The data, a total of 3476 instances to be sampled, are drawn from an overall corpus of 32 novels published between 2001 and 2014. The results yielded by such analysis not only show that the presence of these adverbs is somewhat determined by the author but also that the variables are interrelated across different contexts. Thus, what the ensuing lines come to prove is that the use of such adverbs of possibility is a marker of the writer’s idiosyncratic style.