


My friend P Alice Smith A likes jelly beans.Here and elsewhere in this section, the relevant phrases are marked as the appositive phrase A or the phrase in apposition P. The sentences below use restrictive appositives.

In English, restrictive appositives are not set off by commas. It limits or clarifies that phrase in some crucial way, such that the meaning of the sentence would change if the appositive were removed. Restrictive versus non-restrictive Ī restrictive appositive provides information essential to identifying the phrase in apposition. For example, in the phrase: "My wife, a surgeon by training.", it is necessary to pause before the parenthetical modification "a surgeon by training". That makes them often function as hyperbatons, or figures of disorder, because they can disrupt the flow of a sentence.

Traditionally, appositions were called by their Latin name appositio, derived from the Latin ad ("near") and positio ("placement"), although the English form is now more commonly used.Īpposition is a figure of speech of the scheme type and often results when the verbs (particularly verbs of being) in supporting clauses are eliminated to produce shorter descriptive phrases. Alice Smith, my sister, likes jelly beans.My sister, Alice Smith, likes jelly beans.The two elements are said to be in apposition, and one of the elements is called the appositive, but its identification requires consideration of how the elements are used in a sentence.įor example, in these sentences, the phrases Alice Smith and my sister are in apposition, with the appositive identified with italics: Not to be confused with dislocations, an apposition-like structure whose elements are not placed side by side.Īpposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side so one element identifies the other in a different way.
