Category Archives: English Language Arts

“Apposition: A syntactic relation in which an element is juxtaposed to another element of the same kind. Especially between noun phrases that do not have distinct referents: e.g. Lucienne is in apposition to my wife in Do you know my wife Lucienne? Thence of other cases where elements are seen as parallel but do not have distinct roles in a larger construction: e.g. Smith is said to be apposed to Captain in Do you know Captain Smith?”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

“Auxiliary (Aux): A verb belonging to a small class which syntactically accompanies other verbs: distinguished as such from a lexical verb, of full verb. E.g. could and have are auxiliaries, accompanying a form of write, in He could have written it. The first belongs to a class of modal verbs that can stand alone, as in a sentence I could, only if a following verb is ‘understood.’ The second is an auxiliary related to the past participle (written); distinguished accordingly from have as a lexical verb, e.g. in I have the answer.

Auxiliaries usually mark modality, tense, or aspect: e.g. the construction of have with a past participle marks the perfect. Hence the same term has been applied to other grammatical words that mark such categories, whether or not they are verbs.”

Excerpted from: Matthews, P.H., ed. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.