Apposition

This article is about the grammatical construction. Forother uses, see Apposition (disambiguation).Not to be confused with dislocations, an apposition-likestructure whose elements are not placed side by side.

Apposition is a grammatical construction in which twoelements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side,with one element serving to identify the other in a differ-ent way. The two elements are said to be in apposition.One of the elements is called the appositive, although itsidentification requires consideration of how the elementsare used in a sentence.For example, in the two sentences below, the phrases Al-ice Smith and my sister are in apposition, with the appos-itive identified with italics:

• My sister, Alice Smith, likes jelly beans.

• Alice Smith, my sister, likes jelly beans.

Traditionally, appositions were called by their Latin nameappositio, although the English form is now more com-monly used. It is derived from Latin: ad (“near”) andpositio (“placement”).Apposition is a figure of speech of the scheme type, andoften results when the verbs (particularly verbs of being)in supporting clauses are eliminated to produce shorterdescriptive phrases. This makes them often function ashyperbatons, or figures of disorder, because they can dis-rupt the flow of a sentence. For example, in the phrase:“My wife, a nurse by training, ...”, it is necessary to pausebefore the parenthetical modification “a nurse by train-ing”.

1 Restrictive versus non-restrictive

A restrictive appositive provides information essentialto identifying the phrase in apposition. It limits or clar-ifies that phrase in some crucial way, and the meaningof the sentence would change if the appositive were re-moved. In English, restrictive appositives are not setoff by commas. The sentences below use restrictive ap-positives. Here and elsewhere in this section, the rele-vant phrases are marked as the appositive phraseA or thephrase in appositionP.

• My friendP Alice SmithA likes jelly beans. - I have

many friends, but I am restricting my statement to the onenamed Alice Smith.

• He likes the television showP The SimpsonsA. - Thereare many television shows, and he likes that particular one.

A non-restrictive appositive provides information notcritical to identifying the phrase in apposition. It pro-vides non-essential information, and the essential mean-ing of the sentence would not change if the appositivewere removed. In English, non-restrictive appositives aretypically set off by commas.[1] The sentences below usenon-restrictive appositives.

• Alice SmithP, my friendA, likes jelly beans. - Thefact that Alice is my friend was not necessary to identifyher.

• I visited CanadaP, a beautiful countryA. - The ap-positive is not needed to identify Canada.

• The first to arrive at the houseA, sheP unlocked thefront door.

The same phrase can be a restrictive appositive in onecontext and a non-restrictive appositive in another:

• My brotherP NathanA is here. - Restrictive: I havemany brothers, and the one named Nathan is here.

• My brotherP, NathanA, is here. - Non-restrictive: Ihave only one brother and, as an aside, his name is Nathan.

If there is any doubt that the appositive is non-restrictive,it is safer to use the restrictive form. In the exampleabove, the restrictive first sentence is still correct even ifthere is only one brother.A relative clause is not always an appositive.

• My sisterP, Alice SmithA, likes jelly beans. - The ap-positive is the noun phrase Alice Smith.

• My sisterP, a doctor whose name is Alice SmithA,likes jelly beans. - The appositive is the clause a doctorwhose name is Alice Smith.

• My sister, whose name is Alice Smith, likes jellybeans. - There is no appositive. There is a relative clause:whose name is Alice Smith.

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2 6 REFERENCES

2 Examples

In the following examples, the appositive phrases areshown in italics:

• I was born in Finland, the land of a thousand lakes.- Appositives are not limited to describing people.

• Barry Goldwater, the junior senator from Arizona,received the Republican nomination in 1964.

• John and Bob, both friends of mine, are starting aband.

• Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror ofPersia, was one of the most successful military com-manders of the ancient world.

• DeanMartin, a very popular singer, will be perform-ing at the Sands Hotel.

• You are better than anyone, anyone I've ever met.

A kind of appositive phrase is the false title, as in "Notedbiologist Jane Smith has arrived.”, where the phraseNotedbiologist is used as an informal title. The use of false titlesis controversial.Appositive phrases can also serve as definitions:

• No one – not a single person – should ever suffer thatway.

• You are simply the best, better than all the rest.

3 Appositive genitive

In several languages, the same syntax which is used toexpress such relations as possession can also be used ap-positively. Examples include:

• In English:

• “Appositive oblique”, a prepositional phrasewith of as in: the month of December, the sinof pride, or the city of New York. This has alsobeen invoked as an explanation for the doublegenitive: a friend of mine.[2]

• The ending -'s as in "In Dublin’s Fair City".This is uncommon.

• In classical Greek:

• “Genitive of explanation” as in ὑὸς μέγαχρῆμα (hyòs méga chrêma), “a monster (greataffair) of a boar” (Histories of Herodotus,1.36);[3]

• In Japanese:

• Postpositive no as in: (Fuji no Yama),"the Mountain of Fuji";

• In Biblical Hebrew:

• Construct, “genitive of association” as in: ַּגןֵעֶדן (Gan 'Ēden), "Garden of Eden".[4]

4 See also

• Figure of speech

• Hyperbaton

• Literary device

5 Notes

[1] “Commas: Some Common Problems”, Princeton Writ-ing Program, Princeton University, 1999, princeton.edu/writing/center/resources/.

[2] Chapter 5, §14.3 (pages 447–448), Rodney Huddleston,Geoffrey K. Pullum, The Cambridge Grammar of the En-glish Language, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2002. ISBN 0-521-43146-8

[3] §1322 (pages 317–318), Herbert Weir Smyth, revised byGordon M. Messing, Greek Grammar, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956 Perseus Digital Library

[4] §9.5.3h (p. 153), Bruce K. Waltke and M. O'Connor,An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, Winona Lake,Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990. ISBN 0-931464-31-5

6 References

• A comprehensive treatment of apposition in Englishis given in §§17.65–93 (pages 1300–1320) and else-where in: Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Ge-offrey Leech, Jan Svartvik (1985). A Comprehen-sive Grammar of the English Language. London andNew York: Longman. ISBN 0-582-51734-6.

• On the apposition vs. double subject issue inRomanian, see: Appositions Versus Double Sub-ject Sentences – What Information the SpeechAnalysis Brings to a Grammar Debate, by Horia-Nicolai Teodorescu and Diana Trandabăţ. In: Lec-ture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin,Heidelberg, ISSN 0302-9743, Volume 4629/2007,“Text, Speech and Dialogue”, pp. 286–293.

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7 External links• Allen and Greenough’s New Latin Grammar, sec-tion 282

• Audio illustrations

• Appositives at chompchomp.com

• Apposition and double subject in Romanian – a con-troversial issue in * Sounds of the Romanian Lan-guage

• Graphical examples

• Appositions Versus Double Subject Sentences –What Information the Speech Analysis Brings to aGrammar Debate

4 8 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

8 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

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