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WE will now discuss the appositive phrase found in
the following sentence that I had earlier presented for evaluation:
“Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her
suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs
of the Roman Empire.” The appositive phrase here is, of course,
the parenthetical “the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until
her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” It’s an added statement
that gives context and texture to this vague, bare-bones sentence:
“Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman Empire.”
On closer scrutiny, we will find
that the appositive phrase is actually a simplified form of the
nonrestrictive relative clause in this sentence: “Cleopatra, who
was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by
asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman
Empire.” It is, in fact, the relative clause “who was the
legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite
21 years later” with both the relative pronoun “who” and the
linking verb “was” taken out.
That grammatical streamlining
process produces a modifier in noun form—“the legendary queen of
Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years
later”—that is in apposition or equivalent to the noun form it
modifies—“Cleopatra.” Indeed, appositive phrases are a compact
and concise way of describing people, places, and things or of
qualifying ideas within the same sentence. They allow us to provide
more details about a subject without having to start another
sentence—a process that sometimes undesirably slows down the pace
of an unfolding exposition or narrative.
The use of appositive phrases, we
now will probably recall, is also one of the most efficient ways of
combining sentences. It allows a related statement from another
sentence to be folded into the sentence that precedes it. The
sentence that we are evaluating now, for instance, has combined
these two sentences: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs
of the Roman Empire. She was the legendary queen of Egypt from 51
B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later.” By making the
statement in the second sentence an appositive in the first, we
get a sentence that’s richer in texture and more interesting to
read: “Cleopatra, the legendary queen of Egypt from 51 B.C.
until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later, greatly influenced
the affairs of the Roman Empire.”
Such constructions also have the
added virtue of allowing us to develop the basic statement of a
sentence unimpeded. Assume that we have already written this basic
statement: “Cleopatra greatly influenced the affairs of the Roman
Empire.” If we use the appositive phrase “the legendary queen of
Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later”
to form a new sentence after it, that new sentence would often
become a stumbling block to developing the basic statement. Indeed,
with a powerful statement like “She was the legendary queen of
Egypt from 51 B.C. until her suicide by asp bite 21 years later”
getting in the way, it won’t be an easy task to go back to the
thread of our basic statement and develop it. In contrast, folding
that powerful statement into an appositive phrase in the first
sentence neatly sidesteps the potential continuity problem while
making that first sentence much more readable and interesting.
The appositive phrase we have
discussed above is of the nonrestrictive type, which means that it
isn’t essential to the meaning of the sentence even if it adds
important additional information to it. Nonrestrictive appositive
phrases are parentheticals that, like nonrestrictive relative
clauses, need a pair of enclosing commas to set them off from the
sentence.
But some appositive phrases are
of the restrictive type and they don’t need those commas. We will
take them up in the next column.
j8carillo@yahoo.com
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