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Appositives: The Meaning and the Using of Appositive

Appositives can cause confusion in the Structure section of the TOEFL test. An appositive can be mistaken for the subject of a sentence.

An appositive is a noun that comes before or after another noun and has the same meaning.


Diana, the best student in the class, got an A on the test.

In the sentence above, Diana is the subject of the sentence. The best student in the class can easily be recognized as an appositive phrase because of the noun student and because of the commas. The sentence says that “Diana” and “the best student in the class” are the same person. Note that if you leave out the appositive phrase, the sentence still makes sense (Diana got an A on the test).

The examples below show how an appositive can be confused with the subject of a sentence in the Structure section of the TOEFL test.



In the example above, you should recognize from the commas that George is not the subject of the sentence. George is an appositive. This sentence still needs a subject.

The best answer is (D), my friend.

Analysis:

·         Answers (A), (B), and (C) are incorrect because they are not subjects.





 In the sentence above, you can tell that Sarah is the subject and misses is the verb because there is no comma separating them. In the space you should put an appositive for Sarah, and Sarah is an excellent basketball player.
Answer (A) is the best answer.

Analysis:

·         Answers (B) and (C) are not correct. Each of them contains the verb is, and an appositive does not need a verb.
·         Answer (D) contains a noun, play, that could possibly be an appositive, but play is not the same as Sarah. So, this answer is not correct.

The meaning of appositive is:

An appositive is a noun that comes before or after another noun and is generally set off from the noun with commas.
If a word is an appositive, it is not the subject. The following appositive structures are both possible in English.


The following chart outlines the key information that you should remember about appositives:


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