The syntax of nominal appositives

Abstract There are various types of nominal appositives. One is predicative, as in She invited Lulu Moppet, an old friend , to the party ; one is specificational, as in She invited an old friend, Lulu Moppet , to the party; and a further type is equative, as in She invited Reginald Kenneth Dwight, Elton John , to the party. This paper argues that each type of nominal appositive comes from a reduced copular clause of a certain kind. Such a copular clause is base-generated as the complement of a categoryless functional head, like a low conjunct or a modifier. The combination of the reduced copular clause and the functional head is merged with, and categorized by, the matrix clause. Thus, a nominal appositive is not base-generated in the same proposition-denoting expression where its anchor occurs. Explicit steps of derivation for building a nominal appositive construction are proposed. The proposed syntactic derivations rule out unacceptable positions of nominal appositives. The research explores the general syntax of non-argument-taking relations.