“The Scottish novelist William Black”: Close Appositions and the Modification of Proper Names

Within the category of nouns, proper nouns have regularly been regarded as alienated from the typical, common nouns and this results in them being given an often-unjustified linguistic special treatment. One example of this isolating process is the analysis of the syntactic form [DET + (common) nominal + Proper Noun] as a case of close apposition (CA), an unnecessary label for a form that otherwise illustrates a kind of nominal modification. This paper presents three main CA types – namely titles, pseudo-titles and prototypical appositions – and then questions this classification as well as the relevance of ordering these forms along a gradient from modification to “pure” apposition (as presented by Meyer (1992)). Studying the pragmatic values of these CA types – old vs. new information, thematic vs. rhematic elements, contrastive and metalinguistic uses, descriptive identification – then paves the way for a comparison between these forms and their analysis as a single modified NP.