I really don't understand how the clause in the second sentence can be anything other than an appositive. Adding commas doesn't change a thing. In fact, by the "old rules," if we put in the commas, we should change "which" to "that," and clearly that won't work. As one person said, the fact that "which" won't work TELLS us that the clause is clearly an appositive.

Nancy

----- Original Message -----
From: Beth Young <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, March 9, 2005 9:45 am
Subject: Re: appositive vs relative clause

> 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'tappear on any test--the students wrote the sentences for a
> differentactivity.  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.
>
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