Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post

Apposition involves two separate units with a coreferent.
This! And the referent for both is the SAME PERSON THEY DENOTE! So "poet Burns" identifies the person by his name and his occupation. In "Chancellor Merkel" - by position and name. In "Ms Merkel" - by (wrong) marital status and name.

And you never ascribed a syntactic function to what you deny in being an apposition.

Quote Originally Posted by Philippus Flavius Homovallumus View Post
There would be no racism is we were all Latin-speaking Romans.
Did they treat all people the same irrespectively of their skin color and nationality?