We derive the dominant contribution to the large-distance decay laws of correlation functions towards their asymptotic limits for a spin chain model that exhibits both Haldane and Néel phases in its ground-state phase diagram. The analytic results are obtained by means of an approximate mapping between a spin-1 anisotropic Hamiltonian onto a fermionic model of noninteracting Bogoliubov quasiparticles related in turn (via Jordan–Wigner transformation) to the XY spin-1/2 chain in a transverse field. This approach allows us to express the spin-1 string operators in terms of fermionic operators so that the dominant contribution to the string correlators at large distances can be computed using the technique of Toeplitz determinants. As expected, we find long-range string order both in the longitudinal and in the transverse channel in the Haldane phase, while in the Néel phase only the longitudinal order survives. In …