Apposition in contemporary English is the first full-length treatment of apposition. Derived from the Survey of English Usage Corpus of Written British English, the Brown University Standard Corpus of Present-day American English, and the London-Lund Corpus of Spoken British English, it provides detailed discussion of the linguistic characteristics of apposition and of its usage in various kinds of speech and writing. These include press reportage, fiction, learned writing and spontaneous conversation. Charles Meyer demonstrates the inadequacies of previous studies and argues that apposition is a grammatical relation (like complementation and modification) realized by constructions having particular syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics, of which certain are dominant. Thus, syntactically, apposition is most frequently a relation between two juxtaposed noun phrases having a syntactic function (such as a direct object) promoting end-weight. Semantically, it is typically a relation between two referentially related units, the second of which adds specificity to the interpretation of the first. Pragmatically, different kinds of apposition have different communicative functions.