An Argument against Assimilating Appositive Relatives to Coordinate Structures

This article offers a critical examination of De Vries's (2006) account of appositive relatives, which treats appositive relatives and nominal appositions alike and assimilates both to coordinate structures. Its main focus is on the following properties of appositive relatives: (a) the category of the appositive head, (b) the case of the appositive head, (c) relative pronoun selection, (d) extraction phenomena, (e) the typology of specifying coordinators, and (f) the lack of prenominal appositives. It examines these properties from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective, contrasting De Vries's account with a version of an adjunction account.