Every art has its special vocabulary: think of painting’s chiaroscuro and impasto, or dressmaking’s basting and bias. The art of writing, too, has its peculiar terms, one of which is the unusual verb appose, meaning to place one element (a word, phrase, or clause) immediately after another element in order to amplify the meaning of the first. As tangled as that definition might sound, we compose our words like this all time, as when one might say, for example, that my best customer, an independent bookstore in Maine, has enjoyed record sales this past year. The phrase an independent bookstore in Maine is being apposed to the subject phrase my best customer in order to tell the reader, almost as an aside, a little more about the best customer without constructing an entirely new independent clause.
From this verb appose we get the nouns appositive and apposition, both also part of the technical lexicon of writing. Analyzing our example further, then, we say that the phrase an independent bookstore in Maine is an appositive to the phrase my best customer. When the information the appositive carries is merely descriptive, as in this example, we call it a nonrestrictive appositive; when the information is not merely descriptive but actually defining or identifying, as for example in the sentence the author Flannery O’Connor was born in 1925, we call it a restrictive appositive—restrictive because the subject author has now been specifically named as Flannery O’Connor. Remove that restrictive appositive, and the reader would not understand what author was being referred to—many were no doubt born in 1925. (These two examples, by the way, illustrate a still non-negotiable rule of English punctuation: nonrestrictive appositives are set off by commas; restrictive appositives, never.)
But as helpful and sometimes essential as appositives are, we have to be careful about where we place them. Here’s a sentence I modeled off a longer one I read recently which was exactly similar in structure: Many rare works can be found in the town’s small library, of unusual character, which one would not normally expect to come upon even in the large collections of major universities. What was of unusual character, the rare works or the small library? The key to successful apposition is proximity, so a strict interpretation of this sentence would conclude that the writer meant to point to the small library’s unusual character: the two phrases stand next to each other, and the second, set off by commas, adds descriptive information to the first.
But logic (or what is sometimes called the universe of discourse) also has to be considered, and because the earlier noun works had already been heightened by the adjectives many and rare, a reader could reasonably understand the writer to mean that these same works were not only many and rare, but of unusual character as well. Under this interpretation, we would have to understand that the appositive unusual character as been displaced from its logical referent by eight words purely for the sake of emphasis; the writer would then be expecting the reader to take the first eleven words as one syntactic group, with the appositive at some distance and set off with commas, modifying the central idea of that group, many rare works. This would produce a more conversational tone, because we often simply append thoughts to our sentences as we create them in speaking them.
So should we say that this second example is emphatic or ambiguous? Without having a context, the larger paragraph in which the sentence sits and probably the paragraph before it as well, we really can’t render a judgment. But we can take the caution that the line between emphasis and ambiguity can be fine at times. Some good writers will deliberately want the ambiguity in order to create a richer world of meaning: both those many rare works and the small library itself were of unusual character. But the standard to use both in controlling the sentences we write and in interpreting the sentences we read, is that the appositive immediately follows its referent. From there, we can move things around, carefully.
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