Apposition is a grammatical category discussed in most scholarly grammars, from Jespersen's A modern English grammar on historical principles to Quirk et al.'s A comprehensive grammar of the English language. But despite the fact that apposition has been widely discussed, it remains a category that is poorly understood. An investigation of Jespersen, Quirk et al., or any of the other sources that discuss apposition reveals numerous disagreements about how apposition should be defined and a wide variety of different kinds of constructions that are considered appositions. In this book, I attempt to clarify the confusion surrounding the category of apposition by both defining apposition and detailing its usage in computer corpora of spoken and written British and American English.

In Chapter I, I demonstrate the inadequacies of previous treatments of apposition and argue that apposition is a grammatical relation (like complementation and modification) realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics. In subsequent chapters, I describe these linguistic characteristics of apposition in detail, using three computer corpora of English as the basis of my study: the Survey of English Usage Corpus of Written British English, the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-day American English, and the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English. In Chapter 2,1 detail the syntactic characteristics of apposition, covering such topics as the various forms and functions that units in apposition have and the relationship between apposition and grammatical relations such as modification and complementation.