The tyranny of the majority, and other reasons for choosing a variant
Suppose you've come into a substantial amount of money and want to
spend it founding an institution of higher learning in Lake Wobegon,
Minnesota. What will you call it?
Well, you start by making a list of ingredients for the name. The
two essentials are a head noun X denoting an institution type (
University,
College, etc
.) and a modifier, which is most
often a proper name N, either a place name (
Lake Wobegon) or a personal name (
Garrison Keillor), though there are
other possibilities, and several more ingredients are possible.
Let's keep it simple: just these two.
Then you have to package them into a name, via premodification (N X:
Lake Wobegon University) or
prepositional postmodification (X
of
N:
University of Lake Wobegon).
How to choose?
One way is to look at the way other people have made their choices, and
let their decisions guide you. You might look at the numbers,
which say that:
(1) If X is anything other than University, N X is strongly
preferred: Lake Wobegon College,
Garrison Keillor Institute.
(2) If X is University, then:
(2.1) If N is a place name, X of N is strongly preferred: University of Lake Wobegon.
(2.2) If N is a personal name, N X is very strongly
preferred: Garrison Keillor
University.
Now these are statistical generalizations, and there are plenty of
counterexamples that no one views as ill-formed:
College of Wooster,
Boston University,
University of René Descartes
(ok, the last one is a bit dodgy, maybe too Frenchy, but the other two
are not an issue). In the case of U.K. usage when place names are
involved, both forms are usually acceptable, but official naming
practices favor
University of
N; in the U.S., there is virtually no choice. Still, you could
say: let's go with it, choices as above.
When we came into this discussion, some postings ago, Shen Hong was
quoted as advocating that the choice in (2.1) was a
RULE:
PlaceName
University is just
wrong (at least in formal contexts), according to him. What's
going on here is that a statistical preference is being bumped up to,
elevated to, a rule of grammar, by a kind of majority rule: instead of
seeing two constructions in competition, with one much more frequent
than the other, the facts are conceptualized as a general rule plus a
scattering of individual exceptions, each of which is a kind of idiom
(syntactically ill-formed, but nevertheless occurring, so having to be
memorized one by one).
You can see this sort of majority rule reasoning elsewhere -- in
discussions of restrictive relative
which,
for example, where it's sometimes pointed out that
that is now the preferred variant,
so why not go all the way and use
that
all the time? Recently, Stanford student Doug Kenter and I have
been looking at (and talking in public about) sentence-initial linking
however vs.
but --
I expected a multitude. However,
the audience was minute.
I expected a multitude. But the audience was minute.
and examining Bryan Garner's advice (in many places) that
however should not be used here,
but should be replaced by an alternative construction, preferably
sentence-initial
but.
Now, we found a strong preference for
but
over
however in writing
(extraordinarily strong for some writers: in my Language Log postings
through July of this year, I used
but
72 times and
however not a
single time -- I wasn't counting as I went along; Doug extracted the
counts after the fact), and one response we've gotten to these findings
is that writers should take Garner's advice. That way, their
writing is bound to be ok.
This reasoning assumes, first of all, that the variants really do not
differ in meaning or discourse function (in many cases, this assumption
is dubious at best, but in the university naming world, at least, it
seems to be correct); and then treats free variation as something in
need of a fix, with one variant either confined to informal style (as
has sometimes suggested for PlaceName
University)
or barred entirely. There must be One Right Way. Garner
himself picks the
but variant
on grounds of taste -- more on this in a later posting -- rather than
on the numbers, but he still thinks a choice needs to be made.
Well, I don't think variation is in need of a fix when we're talking
about choices within the standard language. There's nothing wrong
with minority variants.
(Some of you may be thinking that I'm being inconsistent, by rejecting
the tyranny of the majority in this case, but accepting a kind of
majority rule with respect to the spread of variants into general use,
in particular general use in formal contexts -- what some people think
of as the laxness of descriptivists. I don't think the two
situations are at all comparable; in the interests of saving space,
though, I'll postpone that discussion to another posting.)
And in fact, when you look at particular contexts of language and
groups of people, you see very significant differences in usage among
practiced writers. On Language Log, for instance, the
but/
however ratio for sentence-initial
linkers ranges from Mark Liberman at 3.28 to Ben Zimmer at 15.00 to
Geoff Pullum at 24.25 to me, with no
however
at all. (To put this in a larger context, the ratios for
ALL
uses of
but to
ALL
uses of
however in the
British National Corpus is 7.95, in the Brown corpus 7.94 -- that is to
say, roughly 8.) Mark turns out to be exceptionally fond of
sentence-initial linking
however,
Ben to be somewhat averse to it, and Geoff and I to be strongly averse
to it. However (there! I've broken the run), all of us defend
this use of
however, as
something available to anyone, in formal writing and elsewhere.
Back to naming educational institutions. I reject the tyranny of
the majority, and move on to more interesting and subtle things.
Even when variants do not differ in meaning or discourse function, they
may be perceived to differ in other ways. Look at Name
University vs.
University of Name. Some
differences that might be relevant to a choice between them:
(3) Name University has the
advantage of brevity (though only by one or two words, depending on
whether you count the the in the University of Name).
(4) But Name University can
be uncomfortably left-heavy, which would favor the prepositional
form. Still, that hasn't held back Northern Arizona University,
Southern Illinois University, Western Reserve University (one of the
ancestors of Case Western Reserve), or even Northeastern Illinois
University. (Or, for personal names, George Mason University,
George Washington University, and many others.)
(5) The two forms differ in where they assign prominence: in the
premodifying form, the primary accent is on University, while in the
prepositional form, the primary accent is on N, suggesting that
the denotation of N is particularly significant. As a result,
University of Kutztown would sound rather silly, since Kutztown is a
really small town, and University of Garrison Keillor might suggest
that the university is all about him.
(6) For more complex names, in particular those incorporating
subject-matter in the name, the prepositional names might introduce a
potential confusion with the names of other institutions. So,
Beijing University of Language and Culture and Language and Culture
University of Beijing might suggest (incorrectly) a connection to
Beijing University/University of Beijing.
Similarly, in the U.K. some of the newer universities have to be
distinguished from older universities in the same places. One
strategy is to add a personal name to the place name. But
PersonalName PlaceName
University
(Ruskin Anglia University) or PersonalName
University
of PlaceName (Ruskin University of Anglia) would invite
confusion with PlaceName
University
(Anglia University) or
University of
PlaceName (University of Anglia), respectively, so there are now names
of the (to me) odd form PlaceName PersonalName
University: Anglia Ruskin
University, Liverpool John Moores University, Oxford Brookes
University. (Thanks to Andrew Gray.)
In addition to these formal considerations, it's also possible for the
choice between variants (here as elsewhere) to pick up, construct, or
convey social meanings. Different people can even have divergent
connotations for the same variants. So it is with university
names.
(7) Given the traditional official
practice of U.K. universities, in favor of University of PlaceName, this
variant is now seen by many (on both sides of the Atlantic) as formal,
with PlaceName University
viewed as an informal abbreviation.
(8) Again given the official practice of most U.K. universities, the University of PlaceName version is
seen by some as traditional, as against the modern PlaceName University. What values you
then attach to the different forms depends on your attitudes towards
tradition and modernity.
(9) Some in the U.S. associate premodifying PlaceName University with private
institutions, prepositional University
of PlaceName with public institutions. (These connotations
will then frequently contradict the ones in (7) and (8).) This is
an especially interesting case, illustrating the very frequent
phenomenon of conflict between fact and cultural construction, with
cultural construction aligned with social meanings.
The facts are that PlaceName
University
is not mostly private, though
University
of PlaceName is mostly public -- but this latter fact is a
consequence of other things, not a direct association.
Background observations:
(10) Combinations of University with a personal name, IN
EITHER VERSION, tend to name private institutions.
Private institutions are very frequently named to honor people.
(11) Combinations of University
with a place name, IN EITHER VERSION, tend to name
public institutions.
From observation (10) and observation (2.2) above, favoring
premodification for universities with personal names in them, it
follows that PersonalName
University
will be mostly private: Harvard, Yale, Brown, Stanford. This is,
strictly speaking, irrelevant to the nature of PlaceName
University institutions, but when
you think of Name
University
examples, you're going to pull up personal name examples, and the
premodifying form might then become associated in your mind with
private status (and prestige). It's also true that there are a
few highly salient (famous, etc.) PlaceName
University cases like BU and NYU --
you're not likely to think of Kutztown U or NAU or NEIU when you're
dredging for examples -- so your attention will be drawn to private
PlaceName
University,
reinforcing the effect from the personal name cases.
From observation (11) and observation (2.1) above, favoring
prepositional versions for universities with place names in them, it
follows that
University of
PlaceName will in fact be mostly public.
This brings us to the University of Rochester, a private institution
with a prepositional name. Frank Townsend (a U of R alumnus)
reports a rumor that an outgoing president a while back wanted to
change the name to Rochester University, which to him sounded private,
like Boston University and New York University and unlike University of
Buffalo (oh dear, I see that SUNY Buffalo now bills itself as
"University at Buffalo", with "at") or University of
Massachusetts. Meanwhile, on ADS-L Larry Horn has described the
situation at an earlier time:
My undergraduate alma mater, the
University of Rochester, first spent decades zealously correcting
anyone who dared misrepresent its brand as Rochester University (on the
assumption that the correct version put it in the category of the
University of Chicago, while the latter might mislead prospective
applicants and their parents into inferring that it was just another
big city school like (perish the thought) Syracuse University (and
would then cause them to wonder why our tuition was so much
higher). Then, having decided that the difference between "the U
of R" and "R U" wasn't sufficiently robust, the powers that be began
contemplating changing the name completely, but presumably no
sufficiently classy alternative was found, since it still seems to be
the University of Rochester.
To wrap all this up, Bob O'Hara vaguely remembers "an edu-linguistic
meme that used to circulate on the net years ago", a list of "rules",
each of them illustrated by a counterexample: "Schools called
'University of Placename' are always public (e.g. University of
Southern California)"; "Schools called 'X College' have no graduate
programs (e.g. Dartmouth College)". The point was, apparently,
that there wasn't much pattern to this stuff. (Anybody have a
line on this list?) But in fact there are patterns here,
generalizations like (1), (2), (10), and (11), but generalizations with
a significant number of exceptions. No inviolable rules, true,
and plenty of complexity, but it's not just chaos.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 13, 2006 07:55 PM