[Fwd: style remark]

[Lynne Murphy]

--On Monday, November 26, 2001 11:31 am -0500 Drew Danielson <andrew.danielson at CMU.EDU> wrote:


>> From a prescriptivist perspective, is the use of citations (as in [3],
> or as in [Smith 1999a]) as nouns specifically verboten in any style
> guides that anyone is aware of (this parenthetical statement precludes
> this sentence from otherwise ending in a preposition)?

This is verboten in the bibliographic style guide that all of our students receive (which I happened to write, so it must be right!).  If you're refering to the author, the name must be out of the brackets.  Arguably (though people differ on this), if you're referring to the work, then both the name and the date are outside brackets (as below--but read a few linguistics papers and you'll see that a lot of people don't know or understand or followthis prescription).

In _Handbook for Academic Authors_ (van Leunen, rev. ed. 1992, p.12), it says that "You have to add to the bracketed number enough information so that the reader can tell what you're talking about.  Mentioning the author's name is a good start:
        Butterfield [4] arguest that the transformation of France..."
She goes on to say that the name is often not enough and you need to add modifiers like "in his monograph X" or "one of Firth's students".  She never explicitly says that the bracketed ref cannot be used as a NP, but this seems to be because she assumes you'd never try such a silly thing.

On author-date citation, the _Chicago Manual of Style_ says (§16.15):

"Occasions will arise when all or part of the citation is incorporated in the text.  In the example below the incorporated phrases "in Hudson 1976b" and "in Stockwell, Schacter, and Partee 1973" refer to the works of the authors; the dates as well as the names are part of the incorporation and should not be enclosed in parentheses.  "Carter and Jones," however, refers
to the authors themselves, and the date of their relevant work is parenthetical.  When only the date is parenthetical, it should nevertheless
be placed at the grammatically logical position that is closest to the author's name [... I'm going to abbreviate the example here...]

        Jones and Carter (1980) report findings ...
        ...the transformational analysis that I advocate in Hudson 1976b.
        I argue for an analysis bery similar in spirit to the one in
        Stockwell, Schachter, and Partee 1973..."

So, there you go.  The CSM rules supreme!

Lynne




Dr M Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
Acting Director, MA in Applied Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

phone +44-(0)1273-678844
fax   +44-(0)1273-671320