1 - Apposition as a grammatical relation

Summary

In surveying past treatments of apposition, I demonstrate in this chapter that they provide either an inadequate or incomplete definition of apposition, and argue that apposition is best defined as a grammatical relation realized by constructions having specific syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics (1.1). To study these linguistic characteristics of apposition, I analyzed the appositions in three computer corpora of spoken and written English (1.2) with the aid of a problem-oriented tagging program (1.3).

The inadequacy of past studies of apposition

A survey of the literature on apposition supports Quirk et al.'s (1985:1302) assertion that “Grammarians vary in the freedom with which they apply the term ‘apposition’…”

Some sources take a very conservative approach to defining apposition. Both Fries (1952:187) and Francis (1958:301) restrict the category of apposition to coreferential noun phrases that are juxtaposed:

(1) The President of the United States, George Bush, spoke at a campaign breakfast yesterday.

Others have expanded the category of apposition considerably. Curme (1931) admits as appositions a diverse group of constructions, including predicate appositives (p. 30):

(2) He came home sick, [italics in original]

appositive genitives (p. 84):

(3) the vice of intemperance

apposition proper (pp. 88–91), which can be loose (example 4) or close (example 5), categorizations that correspond in this study to, respectively, nonrestrictive and restrictive apposition (see 3.3):

(4) Mary, the belle of the village

(5) my friend Jones

Apposition as a grammatical relation

and appositive adjectives (p. 93):

(6) the room above

Jespersen (1961), like Curme, quite liberally defines apposition.