The place of appositive constructions among syntactic patterns

This paper tries to find the place of appositive constructions in the overall syntactic structure of present-day Hungarian. Capitalising on the fact that 'Magyar grammatika' (Hungarian Grammar), a recent university textbook first published in 2000, does not define appositions as a kind of attributes (as was usually done beforehand), the author looks at the various types of appositions: qualifying, attributing, and identifying ones, as well as appositive adverbs, and concludes that appositions - due to their inflectional endings - play the same syntactic role in sentences as their host nouns do. On the other hand, appositive constructions cannot be taken to be coordinative constructions since their constituents normally refer to the same entity in two different ways, hence they are in a close-knit relationship with each other, termed an appositive-identifying relation here. They constitute a third kind of syntactic construction alongside the subordinative and coordinative ones.