Referent Accessibility of Appositive Constructions in Spanish Press

The aim of this paper is to describe Spanish appositive constructions and to investigate
the discourse role they assume in newspaper articles. Two types of appositive
constructions are discussed: the specificational and the classificatory appositive
constructions. The former present a relationship of secondary nominal predication
and show a parallelism with copular structures. The latter are characterized by a
relationship of non-restrictive modification. After describing the syntactic, semantic
and pragmatic properties of both structures, we offer a detailed discourse analysis
of these appositive constructions in the Spanish written press. A corpus of 10,783
nominal expressions with human referents was compiled, of which a third represent
appositive constructions. The data-driven account is based on the exhaustive
analysis of these referents and aims at applying Ariel's accessibility theory (1990)
to our data. Moreover, the purpose is to extend her referent accessibility scale with
our appositive constructions. Generally speaking, this discourse study will examine
how the nature of referring expressions, more precisely of the specificational and
classificatory appositive constructions, reflects their accessibility status.

Publication year:2014

Keywords:accessibility, appositive construction, newspaper discourse