Form and Function Mismatch in the English Appositional Construction

Abstract

The English apposition construction is a phenomenon where two equivalent expressions (anchor and appositive) are adjacent to each other. The construction, whose grammatical relation is different from typical complementation or modification, displays quite intriguing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics. Syntactically, the construction is analogous to coordination, but semantically it behaves like a subordination, evoking a propositional meaning. This propositional meaning, incongruously induced from the nominal appositive, does not contribute to the main clausal meaning but induces a conventional implicature. This paper provides a surface-based Construction Grammar analysis that can capture such mismatch mapping between form and function in the construction.