Appositive clauses

This paper deals with an appraisal of appositive clauses. Given the claim that an apposition is neither an attribute of its head nor a subordinate part of the construction it appears in (as discussed in the author's earlier two-part paper published in Magyar Nyelvor), a complex sentence involving an appositive subordinate clause cannot be taken to be an instance of attributive subordination, either. If it is true that, in an appositive construction, the apposition and the head are syntactic constituents of the same type, this affects the definition of the type of subordination that an appositive clause embodies, too. The appositive clause corresponding to the syntactic role of the appositive phoric element in the main clause, then, may be an appositive predicate clause, an appositive subject clause, an appositive object clause, an appositive adverbial clause or an appositive attributive clause (but the last item on this list is not identical with the type of clause that had that name in the earlier literature since in our case the subordinate clause expands a phoric element that is an attributive apposition of a similarly attributive head).