Talk:Apposition

message: Suggest you see Merlin Donald, Origins of the Modern Mind, Harvard University Press, 1991, for a discussion of appositional thinking.68.3.35.239 (talk) 13:43, 15 August 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't understand how they're different. Could you explain (and preferably provide references)? —Keenan Pepper 00:12, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  more opinion needed 

message: Someone did a really great job with the NPOV here.  It is silent on whether or not this device should be used.  It would be nice to have several schools of thought on this included.  Is the apposition more commonly used in older, modern, or more formal writing?  Have certain great writers used or avoided it?  If you have some information on this but don't think it merits inclusion, I would still be interested. (leave a message on my talk page)
thanks,
--Victoria h 23:46, 17 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  more opinion needed 

message: Is the year of a date an appositive?  There are thousands of July 19s, but only one July 19, 2002.
:No, the two parts of the date refer to two different things.  But the parts of "Tuesday, July 19" are in apposition, because they refer to the same thing.  Frumpet 09:47, 4 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Are years in dates appositives? 

message: The following is the entire content of Talk:Appositive:
This page contains discussions about the "appositive" article.
=== Witty examples ===
The former witty examples illustrating Appositive built into an outstanding Wikipedia entry were not humorless and "encyclopedic" enough to satisfy User:Burschik, who suppressed the whole and substituted the current leaden and pedestrian effort, with its "Dick and Jane" numbered examples. The former entry, in its entirety, read: 
In grammar, an appositive, a useful dependent noun or phrase or full clause such as this one, offers clarification or additional explanation in a condensed format. An appositive follows the word it explains, offset by commas. One 'way to identify an appositive is to ask the question: could this phrase replace the word next to it? Does this phrase make the word next to it all but unnecessary? 
In this Wikipedia entry, the use of appositives and appositive phrases, grammatical devices so handy that their overuse is tempting, are identified by italics.
An appositive, grammatically incomplete, is always set off by commas, a reader-friendly invention, with one exception: LAPIDARY INSCRIPTIONS CHISELLED INTO STONE.  If you do not have a chisel in your hand, you must set off an appositive with commas, though at the beginning or end of the sentence only one comma is required. 
As for commas, ancient Romans scarcely knew the period at the end of a sentence.
:ADDITIONALLYTHEYRANTHEIRWORDSTOGETHERLIKETHISAPRACTISENOTTOBEIMITATED
Not all phrases set off by commas are appositives.  Some appositives are so brief— and sometimes so inevitable— that they are epithets: Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror of Persia, comes to mind.  But Charlemagne, "Charles the Great", has absorbed his epithet into his very name, much like his 9th-century contemporary Haroun al-Rashid, the caliph at Baghdad.  Arabic personal names, daunting to the Anglophone eye,* if such metaphors may be mixed, combine a series of patronymics with an epithet or two, set "in apposition," a phrase not to confuse with "opposition.".
* a gerund phrase placed in apposition
_____
I don't think the chiseling conceit was relevant or appropriate.  Just say "An appositive must be set off by commas."  The chiseling thing isn't a grammatical exception, so forget about it.
I hope you laughed. Nevertheless, it's all true. Wetman 18:54, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: A joker added a "Cleanup" notice. I removed it. --Wetman 13:58, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: 01-December-2006: Well, 2 years later, I think wit is okay for Talk-pages:  for example, it can be said that WP is growing beyond Weakipedia as it reaches a critical mass with numerous people adding projects of indepth knowledge.  Already, the coverage is maturing, with descriptions of all 9 Beethoven symphonies, the precursor groups before the Nazi Party, and descriptions of early ships that followed the Mayflower.  However, back to the witty version about "appositive":  I, too, am in opposition to witty description of apposition since the topic is complex enough for the novice, so I suppose, for repose, the witty version, regarding appose, should remain deposed as disposed.  No wonder Shakespeare said (in Hamlet), "Less art and more matter!"  -Wikid77 06:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

text: I’m changing the first sentence to “Bill brought his friend…”, as the appositive in the second sentence is otherwise unnecessary. I think the word identified here means mentioned (“the famous singer” referring to a specific one), and I’m also changing that text accordingly. Any disagreements can be resolved by editing my edit, I’m not an English major. (See? Comma splice.) —Frungi 03:19, 15 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Because Appositives are "noun phrases" that modifies a noun, whereas appositions can be anything that modifies it.
68.166.38.31 07:11, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

text: "'King of the French', Louis-Philippe at first was broadly popular." Such a painful inversion, though, shows how much word order does count in English. --Wetman 11:08, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

text: I don't think so, but I don't know what a function hyperbaton is.  If it were a rhetorical goal to speak a hyperbaton, then i suppose that function as hyperbatons would make sense.  This needs clarification.  Does anyone have a source for this statement?  What was meant there? O'RyanW (☺  ₪) 06:21, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Appositive Talk

message: The former witty examples illustrating Appositive built into an outstanding Wikipedia entry were not humorless and "encyclopedic" enough to satisfy User:Burschik, who suppressed the whole and substituted the current leaden and pedestrian effort, with its "Dick and Jane" numbered examples. The former entry, in its entirety, read: 
In grammar, an appositive, a useful dependent noun or phrase or full clause such as this one, offers clarification or additional explanation in a condensed format. An appositive follows the word it explains, offset by commas. One 'way to identify an appositive is to ask the question: could this phrase replace the word next to it? Does this phrase make the word next to it all but unnecessary? 
In this Wikipedia entry, the use of appositives and appositive phrases, grammatical devices so handy that their overuse is tempting, are identified by italics.
An appositive, grammatically incomplete, is always set off by commas, a reader-friendly invention, with one exception: LAPIDARY INSCRIPTIONS CHISELLED INTO STONE.  If you do not have a chisel in your hand, you must set off an appositive with commas, though at the beginning or end of the sentence only one comma is required. 
As for commas, ancient Romans scarcely knew the period at the end of a sentence.
:ADDITIONALLYTHEYRANTHEIRWORDSTOGETHERLIKETHISAPRACTISENOTTOBEIMITATED
Not all phrases set off by commas are appositives.  Some appositives are so brief— and sometimes so inevitable— that they are epithets: Alexander the Great, the Macedonian conqueror of Persia, comes to mind.  But Charlemagne, "Charles the Great", has absorbed his epithet into his very name, much like his 9th-century contemporary Haroun al-Rashid, the caliph at Baghdad.  Arabic personal names, daunting to the Anglophone eye,* if such metaphors may be mixed, combine a series of patronymics with an epithet or two, set "in apposition," a phrase not to confuse with "opposition.".
* a gerund phrase placed in apposition
_____
I don't think the chiseling conceit was relevant or appropriate.  Just say "An appositive must be set off by commas."  The chiseling thing isn't a grammatical exception, so forget about it.
I hope you laughed. Nevertheless, it's all true. Wetman 18:54, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: A joker added a "Cleanup" notice. I removed it. --Wetman 13:58, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)

text: 01-December-2006: Well, 2 years later, I think wit is okay for Talk-pages:  for example, it can be said that WP is growing beyond Weakipedia as it reaches a critical mass with numerous people adding projects of indepth knowledge.  Already, the coverage is maturing, with descriptions of all 9 Beethoven symphonies, the precursor groups before the Nazi Party, and descriptions of early ships that followed the Mayflower.  However, back to the witty version about "appositive":  I, too, am in opposition to witty description of apposition since the topic is complex enough for the novice, so I suppose, for repose, the witty version, regarding appose, should remain deposed as disposed.  No wonder Shakespeare said (in Hamlet), "Less art and more matter!"  -Wikid77 06:01, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Witty examples 

message: "   4. Bill brought Alice along to the famous singer's wedding. Bill's friend, Alice, adored the famous singer, Dean Martin.
"... The appositives in example four are non-restrictive, since Bill's friend and the famous singer have already been identified."
The famous singer has not been previously identified, so the appositive "Dean Martin" is still restrictive. —Unsigned
:I’m changing the first sentence to “Bill brought his friend…”, as the appositive in the second sentence is otherwise unnecessary. I think the word identified here means mentioned (“the famous singer” referring to a specific one), and I’m also changing that text accordingly. Any disagreements can be resolved by editing my edit, I’m not an English major. (See? Comma splice.) —Frungi 03:19, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error in example 

message: Why do we have this page and Apposition?
:Because Appositives are "noun phrases" that modifies a noun, whereas appositions can be anything that modifies it.
68.166.38.31 07:11, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Duplication 

message: the article states this is possible. Does anyone have an example? 66.41.59.162 02:50, 6 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: "'King of the French', Louis-Philippe at first was broadly popular." Such a painful inversion, though, shows how much word order does count in English. --Wetman 11:08, 6 October 2005 (UTC)

text: I don't think so, but I don't know what a function hyperbaton is.  If it were a rhetorical goal to speak a hyperbaton, then i suppose that function as hyperbatons would make sense.  This needs clarification.  Does anyone have a source for this statement?  What was meant there? O'RyanW (☺  ₪) 06:21, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Appositive preceding a noun

message: I think that the current third and forth paragraphs
Apposition often results when the verbs (particularly verbs of being) in supporting clauses are eliminated to produce shorter descriptive phrases. This makes them often function hyperbatons, or figures of disorder because they can disrupt the flow of a sentence. For example in the phrase: "My wife, a nurse by training,...," it is necessary to pause before the parenthetical modification "a nurse by training."
While apposition is quite common in modern prose, it has been pointed out [2] that it is rarely used in impromptu speech, which tends to make greater use of parenthesis or subordinate clauses. In ordinary speech, the preceding example would more likely be rendered: "my wife, who is a nurse by training,...."
should be moved down and form a new section named something like "Usage" or "Rhetorical uses".  I would place it between the current "Examples" and "References". O'RyanW (☺  ₪) 06:04, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  For a new section 

message: *Seabirds can be highly pelagic, coastal, or in some cases spend a part of the year away from the sea entirely. --from todays WP main page, exemplifying a non-nominal (non-restrictive) equivalence relation, without that is, etc. O'RyanW (☺  ₪) 14:25, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm still thinking about all this.... - grubber 19:53, 2 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Cancel that please - I saw "pelagic" and thought "litoral".  Oops! O'RyanW (☺  ₪) 01:34, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

text: With regard to both of my friends, that is treated briefly at Genitive case#Double genitive. Some regard that as a "partitive": "both are members of the set of my friends"; others as an appositive: "both are my friends". TomS TDotO (talk) 14:24, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Appositive examples 

message: In addition to Quirk (1985) two books which anyone wishing to expand this article in depth should study, in my view, are: 
* Acuña Fariña, Juan Carlos (1996) The Puzzle of Apposition, On so-called appositive structures in English. (Unuversidad de Santiago de Compostela).
* Meyer, Charles F. (1992) Apposition in Contemporary English. (Cambridge). 
Meyer's work is corpus based.  He analyzes the gradation in syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from coordination through apposition to subordination that various constructions display. He also charts the differing degrees to which various genres (conversation, the press, fiction, scientific, other academic) and subgenres tend to use different types of "apposition" and speculates on the pragmatic reasons for these differences.
Acuña reviews the literature on apposition focusing on Poutsma, Jespersen, Curme, Hockett, Chomsky, Sopher, Burton-Roberts, Bitea, Koktová, and Meyer.  He strictly applies criteria for judging whether a construction is appositive.  In the end only non-restrictive juxtaposed definite noun phrases, and perhaps certain adverbial constructions are left.  He doubts that there is sufficient motivation for considering apposition to be a relation distinct from both coordination and modification.  The non-restrictive structues are sometimes indeterminate, having a dual analysis. 
I have just finished a 62K article on apposition for the Esperanto Wikipedia and will be very interested to see what develops here. O'RyanW (☺  ₪) 23:34, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Two essential books 

message: As a linguist, I am quite surprised to hear about 'restrictive appositives'.
AFAIK, the distinction between restrictives and non-restrictives applies to RELATIVE clauses, with appositives intersecting with the latter class.
For example:
The man which is standing there is cool. (restrictive relative clause)
Mary, who is standing there, is pretty. (non-restrictive relative clause)
Mary, a trained nurse, is pretty (apposition).
IMHO the whole restrictive vs non-restrictive section should be deleted since the distinction does not apply here. Concerning punctuation, appositions must be separated by commas or dashes anyway. Sebiroth 10:17, 1 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia requires sources, not the testimony of a self-proclaimed expert in the field in question. As for your point, there are quite a few constructions where commas are not used with appositives. To go with your examples: My friend Mary is pretty. Other examples are in the article. — trlkly 14:39, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: *As a non-linguist, I'm no more surprised to hear the term, restrictive appositives, than I'm perplexed that the parochial term, restrictive relative clause, has survived in traditional linguistic circles since the 15th century. Virtually no one outside the English-speaking linguistic community knows the arcane etymology of the term, restrictive relative clause - a semantically-based rather than syntactically-based invention. The syntactically-based term, appositive, is a vast improvement over relative, but I would agree that restrictive appositive perilously adds another layer of parochialism to the discussion. Kent Dominic 05:24, 22 October 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Restrictive Appositions ??? 

message: Would it be appropriate to include something about the "appositive genitive"? The use of the same construction which indicates possession (the gentive case, a prepositional or postpositional clause, the construct) is used in many languages to indicate apposition: Dublin's fair city, the habit of smoking, a monstrosity of a blunder, ...
TomS TDotO (talk) 16:39, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Appositive genitive 

message: The article seems to use the two words interchangeably. If they are synonyms, the first part of the article needs to read "Apposition, also know as appositives...). If, however, as this talk page suggests, they are different concepts, both need to be defined explicitly, since the former redirects to the latter. Either way, there needs to be consistency in the article. Switching words midarticle is not a good idea. — trlkly 14:47, 14 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Seconded Giddie (talk) 09:43, 29 January 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Appositive v. apposition: consistency needed 

message: Well I,(Rosevictor (talk) 19:13, 14 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Isn't appositive new or additonal info set by commas  

message: You need a definition for the wordYou  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.193.130.250 (talk) 23:49, 14 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Apositive 

message: 09-November-2011: Someone has tagged the term "non-restrictive apositive" to request additional text for "[clarification needed]" and so to clarify, I am rewriting the text to mention the concept as to "restrict, or limit, the scope". -Wikid77 05:23, 9 November 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Clarification 

message: For now i am taking the view that that usage is not an example of apposition (but rather an ungrammatical lyric, invented to fit a convenient poetic meter). In fact, i now remember that the apparently analogous "My brother, he says that ..." was a usage explicitly treated as bad speech in, probably, my public grade school in a suburb of a big northeast-coast city.  (Or, if not, in the jr. high of the pop. 8k seat of a county in which about another 3k now live in even smaller "cities", 2k in incorporated villages, and 36k(!) elsewhere, and presumably farm and/or run small businesses directly serving farmers, or the farm families that (i assume) raise big families).--Jerzy•t 08:15, 3 October 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Linguists call it Topic and comment, not apposition. AnonMoos (talk) 17:21, 8 October 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  The usage "My brain, it teems [/ with endless schemes /both good and new / for [[The Mikado, or the Town of Titty-Poo|Titty-Poo]], /for Titty-Poo.]"