Apposition in Contemporary English Book

1	Apposition as a grammatical relation	1
1.1	The inadequacy of past studies of apposition	1
1.2	The computer corpora used to investigate apposition	7
1.3	The computational analysis of appositions in the corpora	8
2	The syntax of apposition	10
2.1	The syntactic form of units in apposition	10
2.2	The syntactic function of units in apposition	34
2.3	The linear structure of apposition	36
2.4	The hierarchical structure of apposition	39
2.5	The syntactic gradient of apposition	40
2.6	Systematic correspondences between appositions and other grammatical constructions	54
3	The semantics of apposition	57
3.1	The semantic relations between units in apposition	57
3.2	The semantic classes of apposition	73
3.3	Restrictive and nonrestrictive apposition	82
3.4	The semantic gradient of apposition	89
4	The pragmatics of apposition	92
4.1	The thematic characteristics of units in apposition	92
4.2	Optional markers of apposition	96
4.3	The frequency of occurrence of appositions across the genres of the corpora	98
4.4	The frequency of occurrence of specific kinds of appositions in the genres of the corpora	102
5	Apposition in the grammar of English	123
5.1	The predominance of certain syntactic and semantic characteristics of apposition	123
5.2	Dialect and genre variation in the use of appositions	125
5.3	Apposition as a gradable relation	130
5.4	The relative frequency of apposition in relation to other grammatical relations	133
5.5	Future research	134
	Appendix 1: Grammatical tags	135
	Appendix 2: Appositions in individual samples of the corpora	139
	Notes	143
	References	148
	Index	151