Apposition, attribut, épithète : même combat prédicatif ?

Abstract

Mats Forsgren - Apposition, attribut, épithète : même combat prédicatif ? This contribution deals with a plaidoyer for unifying the description of the much- debated category of apposition, viewed here as one of three syntactic modes of semantic predication on referents of noun phrases, the two others being modification (fr. épithète) and attribution (fr. attribut). Starting from the pragmatic view-point that apposition represents primarily a propositional speech act — a secondary predication — and a discourse strategy, the author attempt to find common denominators at langue level, in terms of basic constructional and semantic criteria, which are hierarchically ordered, with the aim to isolate some prototypical appositive predicates, as invariants covering the different contextual cognitive interpretations, as described by others (eg. Blumenthal, 1980; Combettes, 1998; Neveu, 1998a and b). Special attention is given to identifying and locative appositive predicates.