Towards a Typology of Nominal Close Apposition with Proper Names

The present work is devoted to the syntax of constructions of specification with proper names (i.e. close appositional constructions in English) in a typological perspective. The provided typology is based on the results obtained in the analysis of the existing grammar descriptions and available corpus data in 95 languages. The paper discusses the morphosyntactic means that languages use to express specification, namely, juxtaposition, attribution, and other less common strategies. The separate sections deal with the distribution of case marking and the order of components in appositive phrases. The work includes an independent study in the spirit of intragenic typology — a corpus-based analysis of factors influencing variation in case agreement of appositives in six Slavic languages (Ukrainian, Belarussian, Polish, Czech, Croatian, and Slovenian). The work presents evidence that appositions are generally treated as one NP in the languages of the world, although there are facts that shows that appositions possibly constitute syntactic units both “smaller” and “bigger” than NP. Evidence from the languages using clearly subordinative (“attributive”) strategy in constructions of specification shows that a common noun is generally considered to be the syntactic head of a construction, but there are certain exclusions.