This article discusses important characteristics that distinguish different senses of the German preposition nach: temporal, accordance and information source, which translate respectively as ‘after’, ‘in accordance with’ and ‘according to/as stated by/in’. We investigate their considerable overlap when the internal nominal arguments of nach are ambiguous between a content and an eventive reading, while excluding animate objects. As such occurrences pose challenges for sense disambiguation, we present our annotation study of 1,173 corpus examples which identifies features at various syntactic and semantic levels. Specifically, we address selectional restrictions, the overt realisation of informational content, as well as the syntactic and sentential context. Based on the generalizations drawn from this study, we argue that accordance and information source PPs are similar in that their nominal arguments can be identical nouns denoting informational content, with some flexibility to change the sortal type. Importantly, these senses convey the individual functional contribution which is necessary for their grammatical description and semantic analysis. We argue that accordance PPs are a subtype of manner adverbials that specify conformity in an action. Conversely, information source PPs are modal operators expressing reportative evidentiality which relate an information source to a part of its content that is overtly expressed in the same sentence.