'[That] includes publisher and date' — no article?

Question

I stumbled upon this text:

Many thanks go, first of all, to the authors of more than a thousand sentences quoted in Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Each author's name and the title of the work appear at the end of the quotation and again in a bibliography-index that includes publisher and date. I hope readers will enjoy these wonderful examples as much as I do and will be inspired by them.
_{—Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style, Virginia Tufte.}
(emphasis mine)

I wonder why there is no article before publisher and date and yet both publisher and date are in the singular. As far as I know, both of them are almost always used in the singular. And if I happened to write that by any remote chance, I guess I would write it as either publishers and dates or the publisher and date. (That is, it should be in the plural or else I should use an article there.)

I tried to come up with a good way to explain this case of a bare noun phrase (also known as "bare NP", or "bare nominal"), but couldn't come up with one. It's unlike "prep. + noun" phrases (such as by bus, at home, on phone, etc.) It's also unlike bare noun phrases designating a role being used after a linking verb (such as "He became president of ..." "She became secretary-treasurer and chief executive officer"). Maybe it's like go to hospital, where hospital is used as if it's a mass noun. (Then again, it's after to, which is also a preposition.) But I'm not sure.

How should we explain this use of publisher and date?

Answer 1

I've seen this sort of thing growing in frequency over the last forty or fifty years. I think what's involved is what you might call 'form style' or 'table style', reinforced by programming styles.

• To save space (and effort on the designer's part), forms you have to fill out typically do not use articles:

  Name: ________________
  Address: ______________

  This is true even in instructions ('Enter name, address and telephone number below').

• Tables, likewise, use bare nouns or nominals:

  | Name               | Country of residence         |
  -----------------------------------------------------
  | StoneyB            | USA                          |
  | DamkerngT          | Thailand                     |
  -----------------------------------------------------
  

• And in programming, of course, terms like this are not entities but names of entities: classes or variables or fields or whatever.

In your example I think the same sort of thinking is at work: the author thinks of the words publisher and date not as individuals but as categories, headings on a table or components of a structure. They're not exactly 'indeterminate', but the determiner proper to the individual shifts from tuple to tuple: The Godfather's publisher, Of Mice and Men's publisher, and so forth.

Answer 2

Can't it be merely for brevity's sake? In fact he's referring to a bibliography index, so 'publisher' and 'date' have no article because they are just headers.