interesting linguistic idea

[jinian]

It occurred to me tonight that book titles can be classified according to what part of speech they represent. The vast majority seem to be noun phrases of various types and complexities:

(Evolution's Darling, Labyrinths, Why People Do Weird Things)

but many are also prepositional phrases:

(From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, Until the Celebration, Through the Looking-Glass)

complete sentences:

(Set This House In Order, The Stars Compel)

adjective phrases:

(Marooned in Realtime)

or ambiguous:

(Slant, Second Nature)

So what I'm wondering is:

1. What part of speech do you think Bully for Brontosaurus is? Wim and I cannot agree.

2. Other stuff, like whether genres have significant differences in title-part-of-speech proportions. I am sure we'd see a difference of some kind looking at title styles over time, but can we quantify it? Number of words/complexity of construction? Can we get a computer program to mine Amazon or the Library of Congress for titles and first-pass categorize them, or does it make more sense to go directly to a Galaxy Zoo model in which they are scored by multiple humans? Is there any way in the world to get a grant for this kind of work? (Probably one should not also be doing a Ph.D. in molecular biology, ha ha.)

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

"Bully for Brontosaurus" seems like a statement to me.

This is the kind of project I imagine Vicka would be interested in, btw. May I send her a link to this post?

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Yes, I guess it is a complete sentence, but I am failing to convey the actual issue. Wim claims "bully" is an interjection, while I have OED backup that it was used as a free-standing adjective.

It's public, of course you can.

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Interjection.