Apposition is a grammatical relation having various syntactic characteristics, characteristics which will serve as the focus of this chapter.

The relation of apposition is realized by a variety of syntactic forms (2.1): noun phrases predominantly (2.1.1) but other syntactic forms as well (2.1.2–2.1.4). Although these forms can have a full range of syntactic functions, they most commonly have two: subject and object (2.2). In addition, the forms making up the two units of an apposition have a linear (2.3) and hierarchical (2.4) structure that differentiates the relation of apposition from other relations, such as modification and complementation. However, like other grammatical relations, apposition is a gradable relation (2.5): some appositions are fully appositional; other appositions behave in a manner that places them on a gradient between apposition and other grammatical relations, such as coordination (2.5.2), peripheral elements (2.5.3), modification (2.5.4), and complementation (2.5.5).

The syntactic form of units in apposition

The three corpora contained a total of 2,841 constructions counted as appositions in this study (Table 2.1). Approximately three-quarters of these appositions were evenly distributed among the written samples of British and American English. A much smaller percentage (27 percent) occurred in the spoken samples. This distribution indicates that overall there is little difference in the occurrence of appositions in written British and American English but that there is considerable variation in their use in spoken and written English. This variation has a pragmatic explanation: appositions are communicatively more important in speech than in writing (4.3).