Definition:
Placing side-by-side two coordinate elements, the second of which serves as an explanation or modification of the first. Adjective: appositional. See also:
- Appositive
- Appositives in Alexander Theroux's "How Curious the Camel"
- Absolutes and Appositives in Frank Conroy's "Midair."
- Sentence Building with Appositives
Etymology:
From the Latin, "to put near"Examples and Observations:
- "Although the appositive does not disturb the natural flow of the sentence as violently as parenthetical expressions do (mainly because the appositive is grammatically coordinate with the unit that it follows), it does interrupt the flow of the sentence, interrupts the flow to supply some gratuitous information or explanation."
(Edward P.J. Corbett and Robert J. Connors, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 4th edition, Oxford University Press, 1999) - "This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air."
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby) - "Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
grew lean while he assailed the seasons."
(E.A. Robinson, "Miniver Cheevy") - "It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster--the period of soya beans and Basic English--and in consequence the book is infused with a kind of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendors of the recent past, and for rhetorical and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful."
(Evelyn Waugh in 1959 on his wartime novel Brideshead Revisited) - "Schlitz--the beer that made Milwaukee famous."
(advertising slogan for Schlitz beer) - "Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins."
(Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita)
Pronunciation: AP-uh-ZISH-un
