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This paper seeks to redefine apposition, a term that is often used in the literature with a remarkable lack of precision. Starting from paradigmatic instances of apposition (Romulus, the legendary founder; Santiago, the capital of Galicia), the main resemblances to the paradigm are analysed in an attempt to measure the validity of a general syntactic relation that is often put on a par with co-ordination and dependency. Paradigmatic appositions and other related nominal patterns are shown to be structures of nonrestrictive modification (i.e. not really appositions) which are best understood in reference to the concept of a Local Domain. The second unit of these structures has its scope in the local domain of the first unit, of which it is an expansion, not in the larger domain of the sentence. By contrast, most instances of non-nominal apposition (e.g. He ran – absolutely raced – up the hill; Burton-Roberts, 1975) are seen as true appositions, as defined in this paper, namely as structures whose two units relate independently to a Sentence Domain without forming a superordinate node in it. Crucial to the distinction between the Local and the Sentence domains is the role of intonation boundaries. These are strongly obligatory only with those structures which have been considered paradigmatic appositions in the literature (Romulus, the legendary founder), and their role is to isolate the second unit within them from the remainder of the sentence, thus preventing it from having a function in it. The intonation boundaries are also responsible for the most distinctive feature of these structures, namely the predicative relationship binding the two units together (Dupont, 1985; Koktová, 1985; Longrée, 1987; Forsgren, 1988).

The range of structures commonly classed as close appositives forms a rich ecological niche where each construction relates to the other constructions forming a dense network of taxonomic and inheritance ties (Goldberg 1995). As a first approximation to the concept of close apposition, however, the structure of that network falls outside the scope of this article, where I focus on the theoretical notion of close apposition itself, on how it deviates from that of loose apposition (Acuña-Fariña 2006), and on an analysis of a quintessentially close appositive construction, thethe poet Burnstype in the literature (Curme 1947; Lee 1952; Fries 1952; Haugen 1953; Hockett 1955, 1958). The thesis that these strings are formed by a doubly endocentric structure where the putative first segment (the poet) is a grounded nominal (i.e. an active referent; e.g. Langacker 1991; Taylor 2002) is rejected. Instead, it is argued that these highly conventionalized close appositions are instances of ‘inchoate’ noun phrase structure, and that the internal constituency of such strings is not fully elaborated due to a lack of strong functional pressure. Three reasons are put forward in order to defend such a view: 1. the construction has as its job the activation of a social referent, and in the social world that we inhabit this is usually done either by name or profession, with no logical incompatibility between the two; 2. the construction is a hybrid of distinct and more productive (and fully elaborated) templates, which act asattractor polesand pull constituency in opposite directions; and 3. the construction is easily identifiable as such ‘from the top’. This makes it unnecessary to have to spend valuable cognitive resources (like creating, storing and deploying inaudible, abstract, constituent structure) when, somewhat metaphorically, one can reach the final destination of that journey (the last stop being meaning) directly, as it were, with no changing of trains (Haiman 1994; Boyland 1996; Hay 2001). The present analysis is framed along lines compatible with various forms of Construction Grammar.

The purpose of this paper is to examine psycholinguistic work on attraction with a view to enriching our knowledge of the grammar of agreement. Following Franck et al. (2006), I assume that the different theories of agreement should relate to the way speakers err when they implement agreement operations. As an aberrant computation of the mind, attraction is interesting due to its frequency: in English experiments 13% of complex NPs (i.e. NPs which consist of two or more constituent NPs) establish incorrect agreement with the verb (as in *the key to the cabinets are in the kitchen; Eberhard, Cooper Cutting & Bock 2005). This is what makes it a magnet for both linguistic and psycholinguistic research. Here I examine the main findings and models in the psycholinguistic literature, and how they relate to existing theories of agreement in grammar. It will be argued that agreement cannot be properly understood unless models incorporate an adequate measurement of the size of the morphological component of every language studied, as agreement operations are continuously sensitive to this. The general idea, which I extend from Berg (1998) and Acuña-Fariña (2009) is that a strong morphosyntactic component blocks (rather than facilitates) semantic interference, and that languages opportunistically use more or less semantics in establishing agreement ties depending not only on morphological richness but also on the direction of encoding.