IMMIGRATION thread

[Gilrandir]

Appositions are something entirely different. Everything you said afterward is invalid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apposition

Apposition is a grammatical construction in which two elements, normally noun phrases, are placed side by side, with one element serving to identify the other in a different way. The two elements are said to be in apposition.

I may be wrong about many things, but the language (English in particular) is what I consider to be my special province.

However, the modern economic framework has become badly frayed and people are left to focus on their identity partisanship and resistance against perceived hostile identities. An obvious outlet of that would be into nationalism and parochialism in general.

If a nation has had its identity for quite a time, it (the nation) tends to grow acquisitive as to other identities. Thus the tendency towards internationalisation prevails. The nations who have been robbed of their identity and whose identities are in the state of shaping expose an opposite tendency - nationalism. In modern Europe both tendencies are evident within one supernational formation (the EU) which causes tensions were are witnessing.

[Montmorency]

I may be wrong about many things, but the language (English in particular) is what I consider to be my special province.

The article has no connection to anything you wrote. Which is why I pointed out that what you said was invalid...

[Gilrandir]

The article has no connection to anything you wrote. Which is why I pointed out that what you said was invalid...

If you didn't find any connection (though the definition of apposition was quite explicit), here's one more definition:
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apposition

a grammatical construction in which two usually adjacent nouns having the same referent stand in the same syntactical relation to the rest of a sentence (as the poet and Burns in “a biography of the poet Burns”)

Ms in Ms Merkel performs the same identifying function as poet in poet Burns. It is true that they identify the person according to a different criterion (marital satus in the former and occupation in the latter), but the type of criteria doesn't change its identifying/differentiating nature.

[Montmorency]

No. Not at all.

You said this:

The titles (which grammatically are appositions) perform a differentiating/identifying function. For instance, Colonel Smith serves to differentiate him from Major Smith, His Highness is clearly different from His Majesty or His Excellency. Thus, titles presuppose at least a two member opposition. Calling any woman "Miss" cancels this opposition rule and doesn't differentiate the woman from others, so it becomes empty which is contrary to the funtion of the title.

What you said has nothing to do with apposition as you have cited it. Moreover, what you said is invalid. Titles and honorifics (indeed, any noun phrase) denote something in themselves, and their usage is not predicated on the existence of similar-but-distinct phrases. If that were the case, then a sentence like "The entity Angela Merkel is leader of Germany today" would invoke a paradox. I think you may be confusing yourself with some kind of distortion of Saussure's claim that "in language there are only differences without positive terms".