The
Eight Other Constructions
# 4 Appositives
Most definitions of "appositive" limit the concept to nouns, i.e., two
nouns joined by their referring to the same thing with no preposition or
conjunction joining them.
They are in Williamsport, a city
in Pennsylvania.
Mary, a biologist,
studies plants.
They visited Denver, the mile high
city.
In analyzing texts, however (instead of studying
the grammar textbooks), I soon realized that other parts of speech can
also function as appositives:
She struggled, kicked
and bit,
until her attacker let her go.
The three finite verbs do not denote three distinct
acts: "struggled" denotes a general concept which is made more specific
in "kicked" and "bit." Can we not then say that the last two finite verbs
function in apposition? A sentence from an essay by George Orwell illustrates
how constructions, in this case, prepositional phrases, can also function
appositionally:
| In Gandhi’s case the questions one feels inclined
to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity--by the consciousness
of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking
empires by sheer spiritual power--and to what extent did he compromise
his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable
from coercion and fraud? |
Is there a better, simpler way of explaining "by
the consciousness" and the phrases dependent on it than to say that the
phrase is an appositive to "by vanity"?
The concept of
the appositive grows still more once we realize that not all appositives
have to be composed of identical parts of speech, i.e., noun and noun,
verb and verb. etc. The following sentence was written by a mother who
had returned to college:
| Heavy feet followed me on up the attic stairs
-- treasure-filled attic,
hiding place for Mother’s Day cards, carefully printed on pasty colored
paper, yellowed packets of letters, saved since World War II. |
The identity here is not of meaning, but of the
word itself: the adjective "attic" turns into the noun. But is there an
easier way of explaining this than as an appositive? In the following sentence,
also written by a student, the apposition is between an infinitive phrase
and a noun:
| Left alone, and needled by that nagging sense
of guilt, she busies herself cleaning house and lets the "coffee pot boil
over," an effective image
to describe her anger, which is short lived, as night softens her memory
of the harsh morning light and she falls prey to her lust again. |
|