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/