The previous three chapters described the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics that typify units in apposition. In this chapter, apposition is considered within the context of the grammar of English.

As Chapters 2 and 3 demonstrated, appositions have a variety of different syntactic and semantic characteristics. However, some of these characteristics are more common than others, making apposition a relation in which certain syntactic and semantic characteristics are dominant (5.1). Because apposition is such a linguistically diverse relation, appositions have, as Chapter 4 illustrated, a variety of different communicative functions, functions which vary mainly by genre rather than dialect (5.2): in the corpora there was little variation in the use of appositions in the samples containing written British and written American English, but considerable variation in the use of appositions in spoken and written English and in different genres of written English. Apposition is also a gradable relation, and if appositions are ranked according to their positions on the syntactic and semantic gradients of apposition, some appositions are centrally appositional, others only peripherally appositional (5.3). Finally, apposition is one of the more important grammatical relations in English, occurring considerably more frequently than most other grammatical relations, such as coordination and complementation (5.4).

The predominance of certain syntactic and semantic characteristics of apposition

Even though appositions have a variety of different syntactic and semantic characteristics, some of these characteristics occurred much more frequently in the corpora than others.

Syntactic characteristics

Syntactically, apposition is most commonly a relation between two juxtaposed noun phrases having a syntactic function (such as direct object) promoting end-weight.