"A little more than kin" - Quotations as a linguistic phenomenon : a study based on quotations from Shakespeare's Hamlet

Quotations "oscillate between the occasional and the conventional" as Burger/Buhofer/Sialm (1982) once succinctly formulated. Developed from a PhD thesis, this book explores precisely this "oscillating" character of quotations: It discusses the nature of quotations and the relationship between common quotations and phraseology from a theoretical and an empirical perspective. Shakespeare's Hamlet was chosen as a canonical text whose frequently quoted traces can be followed across centuries. Scholarly work from various disciplines leads to an understanding of quotations as moving in a space created by the two dimensions of reference and repetition: Quotations are definable by a horizontal communicative axis (reference) and a vertical, intertextual axis of manifest lineages of use (repetition). Empirically, the data led to a categorisation of quotations as verbal, thematic and onomastic, based on the question "what has been repeated: words, themes or names?" Case studies further corroborate the proposition that verbal quotations may become (almost) ordinary multi-word units if the following conditions are met: a) they lose their referential dimension, b) they develop formal and/or semantic usage patterns and/or c) they are no longer limited to their original, literary discourse.