4. Use notes to introduce a supporting quote that would have interrupted the text. If you make a statement in the text and then continue directly to the next statement for fluidity, a superscript note reference after the first statement can refer the reader to a note in which a well-known authority backs up your assertion.1
5. Use notes to expand on statements you have made in the text.2 Use notes to free your text from observations that, however important, are peripheral to your argument or do nothing more than repeat from a different point of view what you have essentially already said.
6. Use notes to correct statements in the text. You may be sure of your statements, but you should also be conscious that someone may disagree, or you may believe that, from a certain point of view, it would be possible to object to your statement. Inserting a partially restrictive note will then prove not only your academic honesty but also your critical spirit.3
7. Use notes to provide a translation of a quote, or to provide the quote in the original language. If the quote appears in its original language in the main body of the text, you can provide the translation in a note. If however you decide for reasons of fluidity to provide the quote in translation in the main text, you can repeat the quote in its original language in a note.
8. Use notes to pay your debts. Citing a book from which you copied a sentence is paying a debt. Citing an author whose ideas or information you used is paying a debt. Sometimes, though, you must also pay debts that are more difficult to document. It is a good rule of academic honesty to mention in a note that, for example, a series of original ideas in your text could not have been born without inspiration from a particular work, or from a private conversation with a scholar.
1 “All important statements of fact that are not common knowledge … must be supported byevidence of their validity. This may be done in the text, in the footnotes, or in both.” William G. Campbell and Stephen V. Ballou, Form and Style, 4th ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 50.
2 Use content notes to discuss or expand on points in the text. For example, Campbell and Ballou note that it is useful to transfer to notes “technical discussions, incidental comments, corollary materials, and additional information” (ibid.).
3 In fact, after having said that notes are useful, we must specify that, as Campbell and Balloualso mention, “the use of footnotes for the purpose of elaboration calls for considerable discretion. Care should be taken not to lose force by transferring valuable and significant facts to the footnotes; directly relevant ideas and information should be included in the text” (ibid.). On the other hand, as the authors themselves say, “Each footnote must in practice justify its existence” (ibid.). There is nothing more irritating than notes that seem inserted only to impress, and that do not say anything important to the argument.
Whereas notes of types 1, 2, and 3 are more useful as footnotes, notes of types 4 through 8 can also appear at the end of the chapter or of the thesis, especially if they are very long. Yet we will say that a note should never be too long; otherwise it is not a note, it is an appendix, and it must be inserted and numbered as such at the end of the work. At any rate, be consistent: use either all footnotes or all endnotes. Also, if you use short footnotes and longer appendices at the end of the work, do this consistently throughout your thesis.
And once again, remember that if you are examining a homogeneous source, such as the work of only one author, the pages of a diary, or a collection of manuscripts, letters, or documents, you can avoid the notes simply by establishing abbreviations for your sources at the beginning of your work. Then, for every citation, insert the relevant abbreviation and the page or document number in parentheses. For citing classics, follow the conventions in section 3.2.3. In a thesis on medieval authors who are published in Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Latina, you can avoid hundreds of notes by putting in the text parenthetical references such as this: (PL 30.231). Proceed similarly for references to charts, tables, or illustrations in the text or in the appendix.
5.4.2 The Notes and Bibliography System
Let us now consider the note as a means for citation. If in your text you speak of an author or quote some of his passages, the corresponding note should provide the necessary documentation. This system is convenient because, if you use footnotes, the reader knows immediately what author and work you are citing. Yet this process imposes duplication because you must repeat in the final bibliography the same reference you included in the note. (In rare cases in which the note references a work that is unrelated to the specific bibliography of the thesis, there is no need to repeat the reference in the final bibliography. For example, if in a thesis in astronomy I were to cite Dante’s line, “the Love that moves the sun and all the other stars,” the note alone would suffice.) The presence of the references in the note certainly does not invalidate the need for a final bibliography. In fact, the final bibliography provides the material you have consulted at a glance, and it also serves as a comprehensive source for the literature on your particular topic. It would be impolite to force the reader to search the notes page by page to find all the works you have cited.
Moreover, the final bibliography provides more complete information than do the notes. For example, in citing a foreign author, the note provides only the title in the original language, while the bibliographical entry will also include a reference to the translation. Furthermore, while usage suggests citing an author by first name and last name in a note, the bibliography presents authors in alphabetical order by last name. Additionally, if the first edition of an article appeared in an obscure journal, and the article was then reprinted in a widely available miscellaneous volume, the note may reference only the miscellaneous volume with the page number of the quote, while the bibliography will also require a reference to the first edition. A note may also abbreviate certain data or eliminate subtitles, while the bibliography should provide all this information.
Table 5.2 provides an example of a thesis page with various footnotes, and table 5.3 shows the references as they will appear in the final bibliography.13 Notice the differences between the two. You will see that the notes are more casual than the bibliography, that they do not cite the first edition, and that they aim only to give enough information to enable a reader to locate the text they mention, reserving the complete documentation for the bibliography. Also, the notes do not mention whether the volume in question has been translated. After all, there is the final bibliography in which the reader can find this information.
Table 5.2
Example of the Notes and Bibliography System
Even though Chomsky1 accepts the principle of Katz and Fodor’s interpretive semantics2 that derives the meaning of a sentence from the sum of the meanings of its elementary constituents, he does not renounce his belief that deep syntactic structure primarily determines meaning.3
Naturally, Chomsky eventually developed a more articulated stance, as his first works already foretold.4 He develops this stance through discussions that he describes in the essay “Deep Structure, Surface
Structure and Semantic Interpretation,”5 placing the semantic
interpretation at the intersection between the deep structure and the surface structure. Other authors, for example Lakoff,6 attempt to build a generative semantics in which the logical-semantic form generates the syntactic structure itself.7
1 Noam Chomsky, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 162.
2 Jerrold J. Katz and Jerry A. Fodor, “The Structure of a Semantic Theory,” in The
Structure of Language, ed. J. J. Katz and J. A. Fodor (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 479–518.
3 For a satisfactory overview of this position see Nicolas Ruwet, An Introduction to Generative Grammar (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1973).
4 Noam Chomsky, “Persistent Topics in Linguistic Theory,” Diogenes (Fall 1965): 13–20.
5 Noam Chomsky, “Deep Structure, Surface Structure and Semantic Interpretation,” inSemantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in
Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology, ed. Danny D. Steinberg and Leon A. Jakobovits (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 183–216.
6 George Lakoff, “On Generative Semantics,” in Steinberg andJakobovits, Semantics, 232–296.
7 In line with this approach cf. James McCawley, “Where Do Noun Phrases Come From?,”in Steinberg and Jakobovits, Semantics, 217–231.
Table 5.3
Example of a Corresponding Standard Bibliography
Chomsky, Noam. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965.
———. “Deep Structure, Surface Structure and Semantic Interpretation.” In Steinberg and Jakobovits, Semantics, 183–216. Originally published in Studies in General and Oriental Linguistics, ed. Roman Jakobson, 52–91 (Tokyo: TEC Corporation for Language and Education Research, 1970).
———. “Persistent Topics in Linguistic Theory.” Diogenes (Fall 1965): 13–20. Originally published as “De quelques constantes de la théorie linguistique.” Diogène 51 (July-September 1965): 4–21.
Katz, Jerrold J., and Jerry A. Fodor. “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” In The Structure of Language, ed. J. J. Katz and J. A. Fodor, 479–518. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
Originally published as “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” Language 39, no. 2 (April-June 1963): 170–210.
Lakoff, George.
