Communication(s)

The following question and reply (by Barbara Wallraff) were published in the Detroit Free Press.

David Tobin of Houston writes: "You'd expect someone whose business card reads Communications Faculty, Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University, to know the answer to my question.

But for the life of me, I cannot find a principle that clarifies when the word 'communication,' either as noun or as adjective, properly takes an apostrophe 's'. I eagerly await your judgment."

Dear David: When it's a field, profession, system or technology, it's "communications." When it's an activity, it's "communication."

And if you can't decide which of those you're talking about, go with "communications," which is the more common word by a wide margin.

Unfortunately, Wallraff got both the question and the answer wrong. When I asked Tobin about his question, he said that there was no apostrophe in it. In other words he was asking about the singular/plural distinction. Wallraff then makes up some fake answer, and gives a rule of thumb based on a false premise. Google counts give a slight edge to the plural, but I wouldn't trust Google to make that kind of distinction reliably.

When we go to the BYU Corpus of American English, we find instead that the singular is about 28% more common overall. Beyond that, there's not much to say. Contrary to Wallraff's bold assertion, I see no pattern at all in the data. To me it looks like a plain case of dialectal variation/jargon. If you actually want to get into the data, here's some to start off with:

The following data all pertains to "communication" functioning as a noun modifier (or as an adjective, as you put it).

1 COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION 592
2 COMMUNICATION SKILLS 575
3 COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR 417
4 COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS 158
5 COMMUNICATIONS CORP 141
6 COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY 140
7 COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT 137
8 COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS 135
9 COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM 132
10 COMMUNICATION SYSTEM 121
11 COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK 110
12 COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS 105
13 COMMUNICATIONS CENTER 96
14 COMMUNICATION 95
15 COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS 92
16 COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY 91
17 COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES 83
18 COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES 83
19 COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES 80
20 COMMUNICATIONS GROUP 76
21 COMMUNICATIONS WORKERS 67
22 COMMUNICATIONS 66
23 COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 64
24 COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE 64
25 COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES 64
26 COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY 59
27 COMMUNICATION PATTERNS 56
28 COMMUNICATION PROCESS 54
29 COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER 54
30 COMMUNICATION NETWORKS 52
31 COMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES 51
32 COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY 50
33 COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSOR 50
34 COMMUNICATION LINES 49
35 COMMUNICATION CHANNELS 49
36 COMMUNICATIONS GEAR 48
37 COMMUNICATION SERVICES 47
38 COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES 47
39 COMMUNICATIONS SKILLS 47
40 COMMUNICATION STYLE 46
41 COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION 43
42 COMMUNICATION BOARDS 42
43 COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES 42
44 COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA 42
45 COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER 42
46 COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE 42
47 COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST 41
48 COMMUNICATION NETWORK 40
49 COMMUNICATION EFFECTIVENESS 40
50 COMMUNICATION COURSE 40
51 COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT 40
52 COMMUNICATION DEVICES 37
53 COMMUNICATION GAP 36
54 COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE 34
55 COMMUNICATION APPREHENSION 33
56 COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE 33
57 COMMUNICATION BEHAVIOR 32
58 COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT 32
59 COMMUNICATION PROBLEM 31
60 COMMUNICATION STYLES 31
61 COMMUNICATION CENTER 30

If we limit the query to pairs that occur at least 30 times, we find that "communicationS" is much more common in this pattern, occurring in 34 pairs with a total of 3335 hits vs. 26 pair and 1961 hits for singular "communication".

When you look at different genres of English, it's interesting to note that the singular noun functioning as a modifier is strikingly more common in academic English (35.2 times per million words) compared to SPOKEN (3.7 PMW) FICTION (1.8 PMW) MAGAZINE (7.0 PMW) & NEWSPAPER (5.7 PMW). In contrast, the plural form is much more common in the print media SPOKEN (9.6 PMW) FICTION (5.2 PMW) MAGAZINE (17.4 PMW) NEWSPAPER (27.6 PMW) ACADEMIC (11.2 PMW). Also, the singular version has been pretty constant since 1990 at about 10 WPM throughout the whole corpus, whereas the plural version seems to be losing favour, having gone from 15.9 PMW in 1990-1994 to 15.2, 14.7 and finally to 9.2 in the period starting in 2005.