Non-constituent Titles
From Language Log: two posts on non-constituent titles, one that explains the term and one with further examples from the wild, which answer the unasked question “What constitutes a title?”
The short answer is, a brief, perhaps poetical, constituent phrase. Here Wikipedia’s definition of constituent:
In syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that functions as a single unit within a hierarchical structure.
Example of constituent titles (from the first link) include The Bourne Identity, Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Enigma, On the Beach, etc. The rare non-constituent titles include If You, If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and Dancer From the Dance. Then there are the ambiguous cases, like The Stars My Destination and The Fire Next Time, perhaps the most poetical of all.
© 2008 M. C. DeMarco
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