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:

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

appositive genitives (p. 84):

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):

Apposition as a grammatical relation

and appositive adjectives (p. 93):

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