Beth,

I would like to mention how I approach this with my students.  This may help,
though you seem to reach the same point another way.

One function of an adjective is to identify the reference of a noun.  The noun
also can serve to help identify the reference of another noun.  This is the
appositive.  By the same token the noun clause and the adjective clause can both
have an identifying function.  There are a good number of particular nouns that
need further identification, and the noun clause is naturally used with them:
fact, claim, rumor, statement, decision, idea, etc.  These all denote concepts
which are potentially worded as sentences.  In such cases it is possible to
express (redundantly) both functions (identifying adjective/statement) by
repeating the connective "that."  Hence, "They espoused the belief that is that
God exists" has two connectives.  The first "that" is the connective of an
adjective clause (relative, pointing to "belief") and the second is the
connective of the noun clause.  If you can build this redundant construction
logically, then you have the appositive.

Bruce

>>> [log in to unmask] 3/9/2005 7:45:48 AM >>>

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.

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