Apposition
modifying noun phrases by placing them next to each other
Apposition 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. The two elements are said to be "in apposition", and the element identifying the other is called the appositive. The identification of an appositive requires consideration of how the elements are used in a sentence.
For example, in these sentences, the phrases Alice Smith and my sister are in apposition, with the appositive identified with italics:
My sister, Alice Smith, likes jelly beans.
Alice Smith, my sister, likes jelly beans.
Traditionally, appositives 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.
Apposition 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. That makes them often function as hyperbatons, or figures of disorder, because they can disrupt the flow of a sentence. For example, in the phrase "My wife, a surgeon by training, ..." it is necessary to pause before the parenthetical modification "a surgeon by training".
Restrictive versus non-restrictive
A restrictive appositive provides information essential to identifying the phrase in apposition.
The public source identifies “Apposition” as modifying noun phrases by placing them next to each other. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Apposition, modifying and noun.
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A short description can identify a subject without explaining its stakes. For “Apposition”, the useful work is to connect “modifying noun phrases by placing them next to each other” to the records capable of establishing context and consequence.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q321056. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Apposition” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.