I discovered today that my students are having trouble distinguishing
between appositives and relative clauses, and I didn't have any clever
explanation ready to hand.

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.

I explained that appositives are completely interchangeable with the
noun they are renaming, so that you could have all of the following
permutations:

A, B, was a classic.
B, A, was a classic.
A was a classic.
B was a classic.

That explanation cleared up sentence 1.  But when we got to sentence 2,
the students interpreted "That they didn't like chocolate" as a nominal
clause and felt that the interchangeable-ness worked.

I wanted a way to explain the difference that didn't rely on pitting my
grammatical sense against theirs.  I pointed out that there were no
commas in sentence 2; they replied, "But what if we put commas in--does
that make it an appositive"?  And of course they will find
nonrestrictive relative clauses set off with commas, and who knows,
perhaps some of those relative clauses might work as nominal clauses
too.

I told them that nouns and appositives were usually parallel in form,
and that if they COULD interpret something as a relative clause, they
SHOULD.  I don't think they were terribly enthusiastic about that
explanation.

Am I missing something obvious in my mid-semester tiredness?  How do
you explain the difference?

Beth




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

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

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