Thanks, everyone.  The "which" test does work on sentence 1, but not
sentence 2.  Maybe we idiomatically prefer "the fact that . . . " or
maybe I should have agreed that sentence 2 was an appositive?  I can see
that it's definitely an appositive in the sentence "That fact, that they
didn't like chocolate, surprised her"--but that's not the same
sentence.

Ultimately, I guess it doesn't matter that much.  These sentences won't
appear on any test--the students wrote the sentences for a different
activity.  I can just agree that sometimes it's really hard to tell what
a clause is doing, just like it's sometimes really hard to tell what a
prepositional phrase is doing, and leave it at that.

Thanks,

Beth

>Here are a couple of example sentences with the suspected appositives
>in brackets:
>
>1. The book, [that was titled 'Great Expectations',] was a classic.
>
>2. The fact [that they didn't like chocolate] surprised her.






Beth Rapp Young
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~byoung

University of Central Florida
From Promise to Prominence: Celebrating 40 Years.

To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at:
     http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html
and select "Join or leave the list"

Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/