Quotations and their co(n)texts : Corpus-based insights into discoursing with Hamlet

The HyperHamlet database which is being developed at the English Department of the University of Basel confirms the intuition that literary quotations come in many shapes, and that readers may perceive them even if they do not know the source text. The paper focuses on the ways of signalling the presence of an extraneous string and in particular discusses variants of clues offered by the embedding co(n)text. This includes obvious markers such as quotation tags or typographical elements, but also more implicit phenomena such as marking by genre, marking by deviance, or multiple marking. One conclusion is to contextualize the importance of quotation marks, which are often discussed as defining quotations, even to the extent of predetermining the data sets selected for investigation. This limits insight, since other unambiguous markers may co-occur with or even substitute quotation marks.