RRhetoric
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Syntax & Word Order

Apposition / Appositive

ap-uh-ZISH-un / ˌæpəˈzɪʃən

A noun phrase placed beside another to rename it: 'my brother, the doctor.' Each appositive is a second look at the same thing. Stacked, they redefine it step by step.

"124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." — Morrison (appositive fragment)

Don't confuse it with Parenthesis. Parenthesis interrupts without renaming; apposition always re-identifies the neighboring noun.

Drill this device — 36 excerpts

In the Reader — 36 excerpts

A host, of golden daffodils
— William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes · open the passage →
When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils
— William Wordsworth, Poems, in Two Volumes · open the passage →
…the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary.
— Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights · open the passage →
…in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of woman by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not …
— Victor Hugo, Les Misérables · open the passage →
Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. She was a flirt—a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category.
— Henry James, Daisy Miller · open the passage →
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment.
— Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native · open the passage →
It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer. A colonial mansion, a hereditary estate, I would say a haunted house, and reach the height of romantic felicity—but that would be asking too much of fate!
— Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper · open the passage →
The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.
— Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann (Swann's Way) · open the passage →
Let us go then, you and I,
— T.S. Eliot, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse · open the passage →
Academy of Music in New York. Though there was already talk of the erection, in remote metropolitan distances "above the Forties," of a new Opera House which should compete in
— Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence · open the passage →
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes
— F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby · open the passage →
That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees
— William Butler Yeats, The Tower · open the passage →
turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time.
— Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God · open the passage →
The sun lay on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like little armadillos, plodding
— John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath · open the passage →
He knew that the moment he allowed himself to feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, he would be swept out of himself with fear and despair.
— Richard Wright, Native Son · open the passage →
I thought of a labyrinth of labyrinths, of one sinuous spreading labyrinth that would encompass the past and the future and in some way involve the stars.
— Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones · open the passage →
…or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex · open the passage →
…economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.
— Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex · open the passage →
Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy.
— William Golding, Lord of the Flies · open the passage →
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of
— Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita · open the passage →
I had not known my father very well. We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride.
— James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son · open the passage →
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
— Jack Kerouac, On the Road · open the passage →
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't know what I was doing in New York.
— Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar · open the passage →
The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five · open the passage →

…and 12 more. Meet the rest in the quiz →

Travels with

Devices that share a passage with apposition / appositive most often — company reveals character.

Anaphora 15 Asyndeton 14 Parataxis 10 Metaphor 9 Personification 9 Litotes 9 Antithesis 7 Irony 6

The rest of the family

Hyperbaton Anastrophe Periodic Sentence Cumulative (Loose) Sentence Parataxis Parenthesis Zeugma Hendiadys Pleonasm Enumeration / Accumulatio Passive Voice Cleft Sentence