[ti:Appositives: Renaming Words and Other Terms]
[al:Everyday Grammar]
[ar:VOA]
[dt:2024-09-27]
[by:www.voase.cn]
[00:00.00]Imagine you want to improve your writing skills. 
[00:05.16]Perhaps you would like to take an English test or use English in a business email.
[00:12.04]Today on Everyday Grammar, we will talk about something that could help you: appositives.
[00:19.43]We will explain the grammar rules behind appositives and demonstrate how to use them in sentences.
[00:28.45]Let us begin with a few definitions.
[00:31.71]An appositive is a word or group of words that renames something else.
[00:41.48]An appositive is often a noun or noun phrase that helps explain or identify another noun or a pronoun.
[00:56.51]Take this sentence, for example:
[00:59.53]My best friend, Ahmed, studies English literature.
[01:04.41]The subject of the sentence is my best friend.
[01:09.78]The name Ahmed is an appositive. It adds information to the sentence.
[01:19.25]What is important is that the sentence is grammatically correct without the appositive.
[01:28.19]So, our example without the appositive would read:
[01:34.80]My best friend studies English literature.
[01:39.42]Now, let us consider a more complex example.
[01:45.20]Imagine you are reading a crime novel. 
[01:49.29]Perhaps the book has the following lines.
[01:54.25]Police questioned the next suspect, the victim's ex-wife.
[01:59.60]In this example, the victim's ex-wife is the appositive. 
[02:06.92]The words give readers more information about the next suspect.
[02:15.06]If the sentence did not have an appositive, it would have been written this way:
[02:23.03]Police questioned the next suspect.
[02:27.62]Martha Kolln and Robert Funk wrote a famous book on English grammar. 
[02:34.76]In it, they note that if an appositive renames the subject of a sentence, it can introduce the same sentence.
[02:45.16]Kolln and Funk say the following description, by Michael D. Lemonick and Andrea Dorfman, is a good example of an introductory series of appositives.
[02:57.95]It is about epithets, or insulting terms, that people used to describe the Vikings of northern Europe.
[03:07.31]"Ravagers, despoilers, pagans, heathens - such epithets pretty well summed up the Vikings for those who lived in the British Isles during medieval times."
[03:25.59]The nouns ravagers, despoilers, pagans and heathens are all epithets, the subject of the sentence.
[03:34.38]The writers could have left out the list of nouns. 
[03:39.09]Instead, they could have begun the sentence simply with the words epithets such as, or such epithets.
[03:48.55]You might be asking yourself why this discussion is important.
[03:53.43]The reason is this: using appositives correctly is one of the best ways to improve your writing style.
[04:03.25]Appositives can help writers change the rhythm or order of a sentence.
[04:09.90]In other words, appositives help make sentences more interesting.
[04:15.57]Think back to our first example:
[04:18.39]My best friend, Ahmed, studies English literature.
[04:24.16]If you were to write the example as two separate sentences, it might be something like this:
[04:32.55]My best friend studies English literature. My friend's name is Ahmed.
[04:39.84]These sentences are grammatically correct. But they are repetitive. 
[04:43.30]In other words, they are less interesting to read.
[04:49.28]The next time you are reading, try to find examples of appositives. Ask yourself why the writer might have chosen to use them.
[05:03.83]When you practice writing in English - perhaps for a test or business purposes - try to use appositives in certain places.
[05:17.07]They will help make your writing smooth and clear - if you use them correctly!
[05:25.84]We will leave you with a famous example. 
[05:30.08]In his book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill wrote the following words about Britain's Queen Victoria.
[05:44.01]High devotion to her royal task, domestic virtues, evident sincerity of nature, a piercing and sometime disconcerting truthfulness - all these qualities of the Queen's had long impressed themselves upon the mind of her subjects.
[06:03.45]Can you identify the appositive? Can you identify the subject of the sentence? Write to us in the Comments Section of our website.
[06:16.63]I'm Anne Ball.
[06:19.07]And I'm John Russell.