Apposition détachée ou liée ?: Etude contrastive français-suédois sur des combinaisons de Npr et de Nc

The article compares the use of the so called close apposition (e.g. le Premier ministre israélien Benjamin Netanyahou) with that of the two types of loose apposition (le Premier ministre israélien, Benjamin Netanyahou and Benjamin Netanyahou, le Premier ministre israélien) in a corpus consisting of French and Swedish newspaper articles. It is suggested that, in many cases, rather than being a result of any particular information structure, the choice of apposition depends to a large extent on the form of the expansion in the common noun. There is a clear difference in the use of the close and loose types between French and Swedish texts. In French, the loose appositions are more common. In Swedish, the close apposition is the most frequent construction. This is due to the fact that, prototypically, the expansion of the French noun phrase is positioned after its head, whereas in Swedish, it is normally positioned before its head.