ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses how three computer corpora used to study a much-neglected area of English grammar: apposition. After briefly defining apposition, the chapter demonstrates that it is a grammatical relation having specific syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics. The chapter analyses three corpora containing samples of English used in a variety of different contexts: the Survey of English Usage Corpus (SEU), the Brown Corpus (Brown), and the London-Lund Corpus (LLC). It describes some of these linguistic characteristics as they occurred in the computer corpora. The chapter discusses the realizations of apposition found in the corpora. The chapter explores the study of a grammatical category can be greatly enhanced by text corpora: they provide researchers with a wealth of linguistic data upon which to base their explanations, and they allow these explanations to include information on the actual use of the construction being studied.