An Investigation of Appositive Noun Clauses Used in English Textbooks and News Reports

By adopting phenomenal observation, document collection and syntactic analysis, this study aims to investigage how English appositive noun clauses are applied in English textbooks and news reports. Appositive noun clauses were found to occur only 24 times in the 60 pages selected from 30 textbooks and 60 pages from 30 Yahoo News reports. This study finds that the 24 nouns preceding the appositive noun clauses may be divided into four types. Furthermore, the 24 appositive noun clauses are found to derive from three different underlying structures. The first category derives from the NP-dominated S, which functions as complement. The second derives from VP-dominated S, which functions as object. The third derives from the NP-dominated S, which functions as subject, and is related to the It-pattern. Appositive noun clauses tend to follow nouns which are more formal or academic-oriented. Despite their infrequent occurrences, they deserve attention because of their syntactic complexity.