APPOSITIVE is considered as an established Grammatical category. But, it seems that the terminology has brought a kind of confusion into its grammatical identification, because individual grammarians have referred to the word without any generally accepted definition. The word has been used in many cases to refer to either aspect of its grrammatical properties - the aspect of relating two syntactic units in terms of semantic reference, or the aspect of relating them in terms of their locations aside. The grammatical significance of APPOSITIVE is equality of the constituents' rolls in syntactic relation as well as in semantic one. The two constituents in APPOSITION are neither separated nor synthesized; they semantically share one reference. The relation is very exquisite. We have re-examined various grammatical relations which have been called as appositional in some way or other, via applying appositional properties - syntactic, semantic and case relations - not as a whole but as separate items abstracted from an integral characteristics of one coherent grammatical phenomenon. And we reached a conclusion as follows. APPOSITIVE is constituted of two NP's basically in apposition in a same clause, which are assigned syntactically and semantically equal cases by Vt., Prep. or another NP. It excludes noun compounds, each constituent of which has a pre-assigned semantic roll and is joined to each other into one grammatical unit. Despite their superficial similarity with APPOSITIVE, individual constituents of such noun compounds cannot be assigned equal rolls syntactic and semantic, because each of them is pre-assigned a semantic roll. It should be distinguished either from syntactic units inserted or added just as adjuncts in order for speakers or writers to put in their afterthoughts or from contracted sentential words or phrases in parataxis. From the view point of transformational grammar, these adjuncts and brachylogical words or phrases in parataxis are generated via transformation, which process is hard in general to apply to the APPOSITIVE relation.
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