Definition of "apposition" []

• Grammar A construction in which a noun or noun phrase is placed with another as an explanatory equivalent, both having the same syntactic relation to the other elements in the sentence; for example, Copley and the painter in The painter Copley was born in Boston. (noun)
• Grammar The relationship between such nouns or noun phrases. (noun)
• A placing side by side or next to each other. (noun)
• Biology The growth of successive layers of a cell wall. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "An alternative for 4a, assuming we mean Alia Shawkat to be in apposition, is to repeat the preposition:"
• ""Choirs" is so obviously in apposition with "boughs" in the line above ( "Upon those boughs which shake against the cold") that I wonder how anyone could think to take it otherwise than "I am now an old man who not so very long ago was much like a blossoming tree in whose boughs birds warbled sweetly.""
• "Thus the clause, "things which are not" (are regarded as naught), is in apposition with "foolish ... weak ... base (that is, lowborn) and despised things.""