Usage of apposition

Question

1) The U.S. President Trump is...Here in the phrase, is 'The U.S. President' an apposition of 'Trump'? And then don't I need a comma between them like The U.S. President, Trump is...2) Teacher Tom is...Here in the phrase, is 'Teacher' an apposition of 'Tom'?Or whether it is an apposition or not, when status is referred in front of names, there is no comma? What do you native English speakers think? Thank you so much as usual!

BillJ · Accepted Answer

The US President, Donald Trump, visited the UK in June.

I've expanded your example to make things clearer.

There are two kinds of appositive: a restrictive one where the appositive NP is a modifier of the head noun, and a non-restrictive one where it is not a modifier but a supplement set apart by punctuation such as commas.

Since there can be only one US President who visited the UK in June, "Donald Trump" is not restrictive, but a non-restrictive supplementary appositive here, so commas would be appropriate. Note that "Donald Trump" can be substituted for the whole supplementation: Donald Trump visited the UK in June.

Now compare these:

We went to see [the opera 'Carmen']. [modifier of "opera"]

We went to see [Bizet's most popular opera, 'Carmen']. [supplement, non-modifier]

Teacher Tom is a nice guy.

There is no apposition here. "Teacher" is simply an attributive modifier of "Tom". This is evident from the fact that if we drop the word "Tom" the sentence makes little sense, cf. *Teacher is a nice guy.

My teacher Tom is my favourite member of staff.

Assuming you have more than one teacher, then "Tom" is an appositive modifier of "teacher". But if you have only one teacher, then "Tom" is a supplementary (non-modifying) appositive and strictly speaking commas are required.

Usage of apposition

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