A little more than kin quotations as a linguistic phenomenon : a study based on quotations from Shakespeares Hamlet Zusammenfassung: 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. Shakespeares 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