Apposition in Contemporary English

Abstract

Apposition in Contemporary English is a full-length treatment of apposition. It provides detailed discussion of its linguistic characteristics and of its usage in various kinds of speech and writing, derived from the data of British and American computer corpora. Charles Meyer demonstrates the inadequacies of previous studies and argues that apposition is a grammatical relation realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, of which certain are dominant. The language of press reportage, fiction, learned writing and spontaneous conversation is analysed.

The use of Concordance for Teaching Vocabulary: A Data-driven Learning Approach

“…(Meyer, 2004, pp. 11-12) To date a lot of corpus-based research has been conducted on different grammatical structures and their various uses such as appositives in English (Meyer, 1992); clefts and pseudo-clefts (Collins, 1991); infinitival complement clauses (Mair, 1990); past and perfective verb forms in various periods of English (Elsness, 1997); the modals can/may and shall/will in early American English (Kytö, 1991); and negation (Tottie, 1991).…”

Evidentials and Relevance

“…'Mary's car, and it is an expensive one, is blue') (Emonds 1979), nonrestrictive relative clauses (NRR) (e.g. 'I talked to Mary, who is nice') (Fabb 1990) or disjunct constituents (Espinal 1991, for discussion within a traditional framework see Meyer 1992).…”

The syntax of relative and appositive clauses

“…We are tempted to follow Meyer (1992) when he offers to consider apposition as a major grammatical function like subordination and modification, but we feel it tautological to claim that ACs are cases of apposition. Rather, AC could be considered as tending more toward complementation than toward postmodification while RC definitely tend toward postmodification.…”