Appositives

According to The Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, apposition is a relationship between two or more words or phrases in which the two units are grammatically parallel and have the same referent. I think is pretty clear, isn’t it?
Well, lets look at a couple of examples:

Restrictive appositives specify the noun. The sentence wouldn’t have quite the same meaning without it.

-Former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld dismissed Al Jazeera as a “mouthpiece of Al Qaeda.”

- Teacher Niki Smith is going to a conference in Kansas City, MO.

Non-restrictive sentences give additional information that we can omit without changing the meaning of the sentence. Commas and parenthesis help us identify them.

-José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain’s prime minister, was born in Valladolid in 1960.

The Truth Is Out Of There

It is Sunday. Fortunately, we got an extra hour sleep thanks to the Daylight Saving Time. That’s great!
Today, I am feeling like a MI5 agent. My mission is: going to a public space and eavesdrop conversations. I am a grammar chaser. That’s my report:

12:03, Java House: two young women are chatting. They are talking about a couple, maybe friends of them. One says: “Katrina’s been obsessing about him ever...” They keep talking, after a while, the other replies: “I think he has some ‘splaining to do.”

Comment: First, I like the tense that she uses: It must be a very long time. It is also interesting the use of “ever” as “always.” Second, it’s funny how we can play with the language. In the second sentence she could have said: “he has to explain something” but, instead of this, she makes use of a periphrasis and adds an adjective, sounding more subjective.


13:54, Pedestrian Mall: I am sitting on a bench, close to the playground. Children are playing and mothers are talking. You know, recent and future mothers always talk about two things: their children or pregnant women.
I hear: “She looks to god for be having a girl... must be boy...”

Comment: It’s an amazing sentence. Women have this special feeling for some things. Grammatically interesting are the ellipsis and how have and be can describe almost everything.

14:07, End of the mission. I’m starving.