Volume 17, Issue 1

The concept of apposition remains an obscure notion despite the fact that it has figured prominently in the history of grammar. Modern grammatical frameworks have done very little if anything to clarify it, and, with very few exceptions, they continue to merely invoke it in passing when dealing with grey areas in the study of other phenomena. Characteristically, one starts studying NPs or reduced relatives, and when the grey areas become visible the words “apposition” or “appositive” come to the rescue. In fact, such rescuing is none other than an admission of defeat. Here I defend the view that so-called appositions inhabit a conceptual space that is best understood in reference to the notions of family resemblance, prototype, and construction. A crucial characteristic of this conceptual region is the fact that its lack of strong formal codification leaves it at the mercy of frequent, palliative, pragmatic construal.

This paper discusses the syntactic similarities and differences in the behavior of subject-like obliques in the Obl–V–(XP) construction in Icelandic and German. Research on this construction so far has suggested that the subject-like oblique behaves as a syntactic subject in Icelandic, but as an object in German. Data from German are presented which show that the subject-like oblique in fact passes almost all the subject tests, with some restrictions. The differences between Icelandic and German are therefore much smaller, and the similarities much greater, than predicted by analyzing them as subjects in Icelandic and objects in German. A comparison between Icelandic and German further reveals that the subject criteria cannot be applied across two as closely related languages as Icelandic and German, and they cannot be consistently applied even within the same language. Therefore, grammatical relations like “subject” and “object” should be regarded, not as universal, not as language-specific, but as CONSTRUCTIONSPECIFIC relations. It is shown that the difference between Icelandic and German resides in Obl–V–(XP) predicates being reluctant to occur in “elliptic” constructions in German, whereas their occurrences in such constructions in Icelandic are less restricted. This correlates with differences in the frequency of Obl–V–(XP) predicates in the two languages, suggesting that the construction exists at different levels of schematicity in Icelandic and German. This is expected on a usage-based account in which frequency is taken to be an important determinant of the language system.

The issue of discreteness vs. continuity comes into play in all domains of linguistic analysis and at multiple levels. The distinction’s experiential basis is discussed, as well as various means of discretization and continuization. Most phenomena are sufficiently complex that treatments emphasizing discreteness and continuity both have some validity—it is not a matter of choosing between them, but of determining what each contributes and how they relate to one another. These notions are applied to a number of specific problems, including genetic relationships, constituency, constructions, grammaticality, and grammatical categories. Special attention is devoted to the network model of complex categories. Like any metaphor, it can be misleading if pushed too far. An alternative is proposed which arguably represents a more appropriate mixture of discreteness and continuity.